From The Blog

Wayn's World

I’ve been getting a few emails lately from people inviting me to join them on WAYN.com (Where Are You Now?). From what I can gather from the web site it’s a place for travellers to network. Have any of you guys used it? And is it worthwhile?

The reason I ask is that all the invitations I’ve received have been from young, attractive women. And that always makes me suspicious!

  1. Shermozle March 30, 2006 at 3:26 pm #

    Looks interesting and hadn’t heard of it. A good tip is to use http://www.sneakemail.com/ which allows you to have email addresses specific to sites you sign up with. If a specific source starts spamming you, you shitcan that address and never hear from them again.

  2. pete c March 30, 2006 at 4:07 pm #

    i’ve signed up to it but have never really found it much use, potentially quite useful to some people, but the only good i got from signing up was that i stopped getting invitations to sign up all the time!

  3. Nick March 30, 2006 at 5:30 pm #

    I’ve had stuff from them before – but it seemed to me to be more of a Friends Reunited-style website than anything to do with backpackers.

  4. Gerbie March 30, 2006 at 10:12 pm #

    I’ve registerd, as the girl who sent me the invitation fitted the category you describe. I haven’t used it much, apart from getting back in touch with her. I do get the occasional mail from them, telling me I have ‘matches’, which could mean anything from someone from my hometown, to somebody’s been at one of the places I specified.

    Unlike several other sites, I haven’t managed to get addicted to the site, or have any decent (travel)conversations with other travellers. It might have something to do with the fact that I didn’t sign up for the more extended, and paid, parts of their website. I do check once a month on average, to keep my account alive, but I prefer other communty-sites like 43 places, woophy, the LP forum and LiveJournal.

  5. Paul March 31, 2006 at 11:58 am #

    I just took the tour – well, steps one and two but that seemed to suffice – and it seems, for all its good intentions, to fly in the face of a couple of my favourite travel-related pleasures: the wildly unlikely bump into and microfridenship.

    My best – and, for that matter, only – bump into story involves seeing a friend who I hadn’t seen in 9 months and thought was in Portugal at the top of Monas, the Indonesian national monument, in Jakarta.

    I’ve had more microfriendships than I can count and always enjoy meeting someone who effectively becomes my best friend for a brief period; with one traveller it only lasted an hour while killing time at Gulliver’s pub in Bangkok but a fleeting friendship is better than none at all.

    The WAYN site may well be a practical way of making contacts and finding your pals but it kind of destroys how wonderfully spontaneous travel can be.

  6. Mark Blenman May 5, 2006 at 11:09 pm #

    Very good site actually – the concept is much more original than so many other online communities out there. The travel element makes it a lot more interesting I think

  7. Caroline Osborne November 9, 2006 at 8:30 pm #

    WAYN is a Great site – very useful for those that are into travel

  8. Pherylori November 25, 2006 at 5:56 pm #

    WAYN ROCKS! Member there for a while – kina slow sometimes though – Bebo and Hi4 are quite good too – But WAYN is more travelly

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