I just saw Dave Sifry post a little note on Twitter that if you want an invite to Offbeat Guides to send them an email.  So I did, and here’s a very quick rundown of my first impressions.

• Service is incredibly easy to use.  You go through a few steps to input your travel destination, where you currently live, travel dates and if you want where you are staying.
• You are presented with a ton of information about your destination.  I did one for San Francisco just to see what would be available and there were over 300 pages to choose from!  The one I did for Boston only had 60 pages though.
• After ordering a guide you can go back and revise the information you chose to build the guide with.  Although, I’ve had a problem going and changing the travel dates, probably just a bug that will be fixed.
• I haven’t yet seen the PDF of the guide, the download link is live for it, but so far hasn’t worked.

All in all, I’m really excited about this service.  I was hoping to get an invitation before our anniversary trip, but alas it never came.  I think it would be very cool to include niche information in the guides.  One thing I’ve been thinking about is a “Photography” section where they could recruit the local social photographers and get their .02 about best places to shoot.