Webware

If you've ever been put in charge of a guys night out, there's a new app for you. Personally I just go out and see what happens, but I know people who like to make itineraries, and they need tools. Planjam is such a tool.

The easiest way to describe it is like the Yellow Pages combined with Tripit's itinerary planner. All you have to do to create a plan is plug in your ZIP code, and pick from a selection of landmarks, restaurants, and local attractions that have been categorized by what scene you're into. Planjam will whittle down the potential results by activity, from romantic, all the way to family places and a night on the town for a group of guys or girls.

Once you've found something you like, you simply drag it over to your itinerary, and continue hunting down things to do. When finished, the entire day (or night) can be printed, complete with important things like maps with directions, and phone numbers and addresses. It'll even go so far as to guesstimate how much time you'll be spending at each location, and how much it will cost.

Planjam's planning tool is simple to use, just pick what kind of scene you're interested in, and drag over anything that piques your interest to your itinerary.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

What makes Planjam interesting is its plan building tool. While community services like Yelp and Yahoo Local offer great user reviews and categorization for a destination, they doesn't always offer a way to organize that information in a way that's exploratory. Yelp has lists and Yahoo Local has its weekend guides, but both are short on an actual planning tool.

My one major qualm with Planjam is that it's trying to reinvent the system by offering its own review pages instead of piggybacking on one of these pre-existing user review sites. While the tools are great, it's just the pits if you're blindly picking out places that might have a bad rep. To avoid this, the service is employing some its users as "scenesters" who get a free T-shirt and profit sharing for writing about some of their favorite local hotspots. For me, it's simply not enough to make up for the amount of places that don't have user reviews compared to those that do on competing local review services. If the Planjam folks are serious about building out their directory, I think the first step is integrating existing ratings from other services like Google and Yahoo have done on their directory pages.

For vacationers in the United States, time off is serious business. Most folks only get two weeks of playtime, and planning what to do and where to do it can be a serious pain. TripCart is a do-it-yourself trip-planning service that's a cross between Yelp and AAA's TripTik service. The site employs a mix of Google Maps, and local attraction ratings--user and editor generated--to let you browse and find interesting things to do. Instead of slurping in content from other services (similar to what Yahoo Local has done with Yelp), the reviews and ratings are site-specific.

The real killer application of TripCart is putting together your trip. Simply explore things you'd like to do on a list, or by browsing through them by genre on the map. To add them to your itinerary, just click the "add to trip" button. If you've logged in to the site, TripCart will keep track of your picks and let you edit and manage them in a separate section called "plan trip." Here, you can sort your picked items by item type or region, meaning that with one click you can figure out the best plan of attack for hitting each destination without zigzagging around town.

Best of all, there's a printable version that will take each of your entries in the order you chose and print them up with titles, addresses, and descriptions in both a summary and daily view. It's essentially a do-it-yourself guidebook.

Despite its dead simple concept, and great local results, it would be really nice to get some secondary recommendations about places from Yelp or Yahoo Local. There is something to be said about the wisdom of the masses, and it's quite clear of that when it comes to food recommendations. Secondly, the site is a little on the slow side, and I could see using it to add more than 40 or 50 destinations a little cumbersome. You're also limited to the United States, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, unless you're leaving the country. In the meantime, if you're looking for a well-designed and easy to use trip planner, TripCart is a really solid solution.

Find stuff to do for your vacation and add it to a trip with TripCart. The service also lets you manage and print out your itinerary for later.

(Credit: CNET Networks)