WAYN.com, which stands for Where Are You Now, offers travelers from around the world the opportunity to interact with each other, sharing their travel experiences with a global community of users who have similar interests while keeping logs of past, present, and future travel. Similar to MySpace.com, WAYN has attracted $11 million investment earlier this week from a group of investors including Cheapflights CEO David Soskin and lastminute.com co-founder Brent Hoberman. 

With user generated content from travelers around the world, WAYN’s community of users now have the power to significantly influence traveler’s itineraries, expectations, and purchasing intent. Additionally, by creating an audience of millions of travelers, WAYN also has the power to disrupt traditional forms of media by being the intermediary between travelers and travel deals.

With WAYN, travelers can share trip details, travel logs, journals, and photos while using email, SMS, chatboards, and an instant messenger to communicate with friends and family and other travelers. You can even track travelers on a world map and connect with users in destinations from around the world.

While the verdict is still out on WAYN’s continued success, one thing is for certain - similar solutions are going to enter the market and have a significant influence on the tourism industry as a whole. As the Internet continues to shift to social networking with successful websites such as MySpace.com, Facebook and LinkedIn, the tourism industry is going to have to act fast by taking a proactive role by becoming part of the evolving dialogue happening amongst a global community of travelers online. Tourism is a natural fit for social networking and it looks like WAYN has a significant opportunity to take ownership of this space.

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