Travel, mark and share with Treelz

‘Hi Mom! Guess what? Today I visited Venice. Go to treelz.com to see photos of me when I was drunk and fell off a gondola!’ Okay, maybe that’d be too much information to share with dear old mom, but Treelz is an ideal way to share not only your travel experiences in exotic locales, but also more commonplace stuff, like simple snapshots of your day-to-day life on the TU campus or of your student flat.

‘Mark your world’ is the slogan for Treelz’s online community site: to use, you simply mark the places where you are or have visited on a Google map, and then attach to these places your various photos and comments, which are shared with other Treelz users, who in turn share their place-specific photos and information with you. 

Because using Treelz centers around specific locations, it has a virtually limitless number of possible applications. For globetrotters, Treelz can provide a wide variety of unedited and non-commercial information about touristic places to visit. Other localities that can be marked and shared at Treelz could be, for example, areas that have a unique biodiversity, historically important buildings or specific characteristics that are important for academic research.

The ‘founding fathers’ of Treelz are TU Delft students Arjen van Spronsen (IDE), Floris Schrader (IDE) and Steven Koolen (EWI, recently graduated). “We came up with the idea of a service to easily share locations with our friends,” says Van Spronsen, a partner at Treelz. “This was something that was lacking in the current mapping applications.”

Initially, Treelz was aimed primarily at marking travel destinations and social events, like, for example, favorite bars around the world, or festivals that are held annually. Treelz 2.0 however enables users to create groups, a feature that offers important professional applications.

Spronsen: “With the possibility to form a group, Treelz becomes interesting for professionals, such as architects who, for example, want to share information around particular buildings or locations.” Architects who design buildings from waste materials, for instance, could show these buildings to their peers and others and provide these ‘marks’ with additional information. Students, tourists, surfers, walkers, travel agencies…are just a few examples of the other groups Treelz is targeting.

Professional

Last year Treelz came in second place in the ‘Are you better than Microsoft?’ contest, which was organized by the Internet company Tam Tam, in cooperation with TU Delft and Microsoft. Treelz did however receive the most votes from the public. The contest, which is held annually, invites students from TU Delft and other universities to develop prototypes of creative online services.

Keywords for today’s web developers and web developer wannabes are: mash-ups, web 2.0, gadgets, widgets, online and mobile. Last year two important contest criteria were that the site developed had to be a mashup (a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool) and that it had to use at least one Microsoft technology. 

“Treelz can be viewed in Microsoft Internet Explorer, so that criteria were met,” Spronsen says. “The technological innovative value of Treelz was not very high, but the public recognized Treelz’s potential from the beginning – hence their support.”

With seemingly ever-increasing numbers of social networking sites, users are faced with a dilemma: which one to choose? The most popular of these sites are Myspace, Facebook, Friendster, Orkut, Netlog and, in the Netherlands, Hyves. These sn-sites all pretty much offer the same services, although there are some slight differences.

Adding yet another similar site to this crowd obviously doesn’t make much business sense. “It’s not our intention to compete with social networking sites. Our aim is to make it easy to share information about locations with other people, on a social and professional level,” Spronsen explains, while adding that Treelz can be integrated within Facebook or MySpace on user profiles. 

Mashup

Treelz is free to its users. The business model is based on the integration of Treelz in the websites of companies and public institutions. “If companies or organizations want to use the Treelz platform for professional purposes, they must buy a license,” Spronsen says. For businesses, Treelz offers possibilities for advertising on the map pages, as well as on the company’s website homepage.

Treelz is a Google maps mashup, so therefore also suffers from Google maps’ shortcomings: not all areas in the world (like Latin America) are covered with the same degree of detail as the USA and Europe.

“We do indeed depend on the maps that are currently on the market,” Spronsen confirms. “Google is however continuously improving the reach of its maps, and in future we will also offer our members and clients the option of choosing between Google maps, Microsoft’s live maps, and Yahoo maps.”

Although Microsoft’s and Yahoo’s maps also lack detailed topographic information, they will complement Treelz’s Google maps, because they have a better reach in other countries and regions.

Spronsen says that the Treelz team members have always been interested in current technological developments and entrepreneurship. And, moreover, because two of the three members are still students, it has been easy for them to experiment with new ideas and concepts.

“We’re students, so it’s relatively easy for us to invest time in the development of the concept, without needing any large financial investments,” Spronsen says. “And because we all believe that Treelz is a promising application, we’re willing to spend a lot of time on continuously developing it.”

Arjen van Spronsen and Floris Schrader (Photo: Sam Rentmeester/FMAX)