Hello WAYNers,

Hope you are all refreshed after the weekend Here at WAYN HQ, just as the spring sun pushes through the winter clouds, the whole WAYN team refocuses its energies on site refinements such as navigation, positive user experience and bug elimination.

Indeed, all the hard work of the past few months is paying off handsomely. We’re pleased to say, and Alexa Internet (www.alexa.com) confirms, that daily traffic on the site continues its upward trajectory since WAYN’s re-launch. Check out the graph taken from Alexa Internet last Friday (18 February 2011) comparing the daily traffic ranks of wayn.com, lonelyplanet.com, tripit.com, bebo.com and tripadvisor.com.

As you can see from the graph (the blue worm above), since January’s site re-launch, there has been an unmistakable upward growth in WAYN’s daily traffic rank, culminating- we are pleased to say, in a ranking of 967 on Alexa on Friday.

This is certainly then a resounding vote of confidence from WAYN users in the efforts we are making to streamline the site. But of course our work is never complete, and the challenge now is keeping our traffic high by improving our product through innovation and consistency. But we have trained our sights on tripadvisor now, and with this momentum, we say ‘anything is possible’.

On other matters, last week we were pleased to announce our partnership with one of the premier travel search engines in the business- Momondo.com. We are especially excited about this partnership because it means that Momondo’s industry leading technology will help bring our members one step closer to realizing their travel dreams. Further, its innovative product means that Momondo can even recommend destinations for you depending on the colour of your mood! Check out the Momondo profile here.

And the news of the coming together of two significant players in the travel tech sphere has certainly created some buzz around the industry, a leading article in tnooz this morning attesting to this.

Finally, on to more social matters, we were pleased to see a number of our loyal members at our Valentines Party Friday before last. It really was great to hear meet and greet the faithful who make WAYN what it is today, many of who regaled us with tales of travels throughout the world. Check out some of the pics on our Facebook page, with more on the way.

So as we savour the rewards of our hard work, its back to the grindstone again.  As always, there is still more to come, so stay tuned!

The WAYN Founders

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Hi again everyone!

Hope you are all keeping well and looking forward to Valentine’s weekend We certainly are. As our Members and Facebook and Twitter fans are aware, WAYN is hosting a party tonight in Kensington, London to celebrate the latest upgrade to the site and meet some of our most loyal members. As you read in our previous post, designing and implementing the new WAYN site was certainly a busy and exciting period for us, and so far- barring a few pesky bugs- it has been a tremendous success. So the party will be a time for the WAYN team to let our hair down, give each other a pat on the back, while getting first hand reactions from our members

To get yourself in the mood, have a look at the pics of last year’s event when we were graced with the presence of no less than David Beckham! Wonder who’ll turn up this year! Sadly however, co-Founder Jerome will not be joining us as he had some urgent business in South Africa (but we’ll be sure to have his share of the free cocktails!)

Back on the subject of the site, we’ve got further refinements due in the next few weeks, and our development and product teams are working round the clock to have them up. We are especially excited about a certain ‘Map Your Friends’ app!  We’re not going to say anymore at this stage (as we’re sworn to secrecy to our developer-in-chief Michal), but here’s a sneak peek:

Finally, we got a really nice mention in the UK’s Telegraph newspaper last week highlighting how we’ve made a successful jump across the pond to New York. As readers of this blog know, we successfully opened up a New York office to cater to our growing American member base late last year. We’re now pleased to announce that we hired none other than Mike Geer (MG to everyone at WAYN), the ex-CEO of Badoo.com, to oversee operations there. We’re looking forward to MG’s no-nonsense, straight talk (and wouldn’t expect anything less from a New York native!)

So that’s about all for now folks.  Here’s hoping to see some of you this evening!

The WAYN Founders

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Hi everyone!

Hope 2011 has been treating you well so far January has certainly been a very busy and exciting time for all of us here at WAYN, for as all WAYNers are now aware, we successfully completed a major upgrade to the site!

We’ve spent a long time perfecting the redesigned look and feel of the site and we hope you’ll be impressed with its improved functionality.

Engaging in such an overhaul is a decision we don’t take lightly as founders because we don’t want to alienate our core members, who have invariably been with us from the start, and who are happy with the way the site works. On the flip side however, we need to constantly innovate in order to make the WAYN experience as pleasing and useful to our whole membership base, and importantly, to new members. Attracting new members is in fact increasingly important in order to keep pace with the social media revolution because the more people within and outside your social graph are on a particular social platform, the more use you get out of it. Because ultimately, the ability to interact and connect virtually with as many others as possible is what social media is all about.

So we hope that in this instance, as in the past, the upgrade will excite existing and new members.

As for the redesign itself, the whole team were driven by the desire to make it even easier to connect with people who share your interests in terms of where you would love to go and what you would love to do (which indeed is what WAYN is all about!). So you can now search for people and photos based on the destination or activity you are interested in, while the ‘Local View’ feature means that as you update your current location, you will be able to interact and engage with others in the same locality. Great for making friends quick! To learn more about the improvements we’ve made including the ones that are still on the way, click here

Finally, and on a lighter note, some of you have already seen our Oscar worthy performance in the short movie showing one of our many meetings discussing the upgrade but if you haven’t click here. We’ve been inundated with questions about the ending, so we feel it’s time to reveal who (or what!) that is. Well it’s our colleague Ben O’Grady in ‘Crabman’ mode- apparently, similar to the Peter Parker/Spiderman story, Ben was bitten by a crab some years ago and has never been the same since…

Take care,

The WAYN Founders

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