The Company
Trazzler helps you and your friends answer one question: "Where should I go?" As you Trazzle (browse) through trips, add to your wishlist and recommend your favorite trips, Trazzler gets to know your travel personality and gives you personalized recommendations. What makes Trazzler unique is its simple user interface. Each Trazzler trip is hand-picked and written by a real person, who loved the place and took the time to write about it.
Trazzler first launched as an application on Facebook Platform back in 2007 after Adam Rugel and Twitter co-founder Biz Stone hatched the idea on a whim over pistachio nuts in the Twitter kitchen. Trazzler.com came next. In the summer of 2008, Trazzler was awarded an fbFund grant and they are using the money to make Facebook Connect an integral part of the Trazzler website.
Their Facebook Connect Implementation
Trazzler.com was built entirely by Adam Weller. The Trazzler team initially thought they would implement Facebook Connect just for account creation and to distribute Trazzler content in the Facebook News Feed. But when Adam Weller and Adam Rugel started looking at Facebook Connect in the context of all of the development work left on their plate, they realized it might be able to solve additional problems. Ultimately, they decided to dive deeply and integrate Facebook Connect on multiple levels.
Primary Account Creation and Login = Real Identities
Trazzler uses Facebook Connect as the primary account creation and login mechanism on the site.
The advantage of the Facebook Connect account creation process is that users are comfortable with it, leading to a higher conversion rate. The bonus is real identities, profile pictures, and actual names. This comes in handy on our user and writer profiles.
- Adam Rugel, Founder, Trazzler
Email Newsletters With Extended Permission
Customized weekly email recommendations are a critical part of Trazzler's business. Before they integrated Facebook Connect, they had already set up an in-house mail server and they wanted to continue to maintain total control over their email program. As part of the Facebook Connect login process, Trazzler asks users for additional permission to send them email. If the user accepts, Trazzler can store a proxied email address along with the new account, allowing them to seamlessly include Facebook Connect signups in their standard email program.
Distribution
One of the well-known benefits of Facebook Connect is the ability to publish content to the Facebook News Feed in a social (and therefore highly relevant) way. Trazzler spends a considerable amount of time and effort hand-selecting great trips and carefully editing the text and photographs associated with each one. They hope that well-written headline copy and eye-popping photographs will stand out in the News Feed and introduce countless Facebook users to their site.
Automatic Social Graph
Immediately after creating a Facebook Connect account on Trazzler, users can find their Facebook friends on Trazzler and learn about the kind of trips they like.
User-to-User Communication and Friending (Coming Soon)
Trazzler relies heavily on Facebook for some core social functions.
One of our pet peeves has always been receiving forwarded email from websites that we don't use on a daily basis (for example, "Jackie Chiles sent you a message on fillintheblank.com"). Since we put ourselves in this category, we thought it would be a better user experience (and easier) to rely entirely on Facebook for user-to-user communication. We think it makes a lot more sense for users to email to each other through a system they already use. The same goes with friending... we're more than content to rely on Facebook's infrastructure here too.
- Adam Rugel, Founder, Trazzler
How Facebook Connect Helps Trazzler
Facebook Connect brings powerful social and community-building capabilities to Trazzler without us having to reinvent the wheel. Or to put it more plainly: with Facebook Connect, our users can bring their real identity and their friends to Trazzler.com and we can focus on what we do best--creating a high-quality, personalized online travel experience. The one-click account creation process and viral invitations are tools that increase conversion rates, sign-ups, and have the potential to drive new, valuable traffic. Trazzlers can recommend trips on their Facebook Walls, track where their friends want to go, and will soon be able to compare travel compatibility. There is, perhaps, no better way to get to know someone than to travel together; we expect our Trazzler.com Facebook Connect users to do just this--virtually and in real-life--by planning, sharing, discussing, comparing, recommending, and dreaming about the travel possibilities together.
- Adam Rugel, Founder, Trazzler