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"Traverie, a new site launched this week, wants to turn your friends' Facebook photos into your next vacation. The virtual travel magazine compiles photos from friends' albums to suggest places to visit and sights to see. \nThe Traverie team is made up of former members from Microsoft's Bing, Yahoo and Tivo, who developed an algorithm to pull travel-specific photos from friends' pages. You must have a Facebook account to use the site, but each profile remains private. \n\"We're bringing photos into a magazine-like experience that's visually very rich, and you discover places in a more natural way,\" says founder Gaurav Agarwal. \"Friends tell you about experiences and inspire you to travel ... our goal is to help users find hidden gems, and then check in and provide feedback on these experiences.\"\nThe site helps users structure future vacations by creating a map of friends' visited locations and creates \"bucket list\" pages for specific trips. Between sports rants and the presidential election, odds are you forgot about your cousin's trip to Prague last month \u2014 so Traverie is a good way to bring to the surface friends' photos you may have missed. \nProfiles are broken down into two sections: a \"dream\" page where you can create a bucket list for a specific destination based on favorite photos, and a \"map\" which pinpoints all of the locations visited in your network. For those social butterflies with more than a couple hundred friends, it will take some time for your map to accurately populate. \n\n\nEventually, Traverie will partner with hotel chains and other travel-related companies to add a Yelp-like aspect to bucket lists: imagine getting recommended hostels or tour agencies based on your friends' experiences. \n\nSEE ALSO: Social Travel Apps Broaden Your Travel Options\nThe site is a fun way to look through friends' photos and dream about future getaways, but it has a lot of information to sift through. For example, Traverie pulls in albums that are geotagged, so that doesn\u2019t necessarily mean the photos are of vacations in the obvious sense.\nTraverie has a \"survey\" option to pose questions about specific trips to friends via Facebook so you can actually plan a trip. \"Surveys are our way of adding structure to an otherwise vague way of getting information,\" Agarwal says. \"Responses [to statuses] are often 'have fun,' or 'I\u2019m jealous,' and that's not giving the feedback you want.\"\nIt also respects current photo privacy settings: If only five out of 200 friends can view your album of the last-minute jaunt to Vegas, only those five will be able to see the same photos on Traverie. \nThe company is currently bootstrapping its operations and is looking to raise its first round of seed funding in coming months.\nAre you more likely to plan your next vacation based on friends' recommendations? Let us know in the comments.\nImages courtesy of Traverie, iStockphoto, serrnovik"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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