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.
Popularity: 23% [?]
Popularity: 23% [?]

Socially Speaking
Dave is off to our first prenatal class. (via Facebook)
Monday, February 18, 2008 7:15 PM