WAYN (an
acronym
An acronym is a word or name formed from the initial components of a longer name or phrase. Acronyms are usually formed from the initial letters of words, as in ''NATO'' (''North Atlantic Treaty Organization''), but sometimes use syllables, as ...
for ''Where Are You Now?'') is a social travel network.
Its stated goal is to ''help discover where to go and meet like-minded people.'' WAYN was founded in 2002.
[
WAYN has been known to send ]spam emails
Email spam, also referred to as junk email, spam mail, or simply spam, is unsolicited messages sent in bulk by email (spamming).
The name comes from a Monty Python sketch in which the name of the canned pork product Spam is ubiquitous, unavoida ...
to all contacts of its users Others have raised concerns that they misuse users data to make money. Other sources of income include showing advertising for places a person is visiting.
Like other social networking service
A social networking service or SNS (sometimes called a social networking site) is an online platform which people use to build social networks or social relationships with other people who share similar personal or career content, interests, act ...
s, WAYN enables its users to create a profile and upload photos. Users can search for other users and link them to their profiles as friends. In 2015 it claims to have over 20 million users.Lastminute.com
lastminute.com is an online travel and leisure retailer.
The company was founded by Martha Lane Fox and Brent Hoberman in 1998 and was a part of the UK internet boom of the late 1990s, part of the dot-com bubble and trading on the London S ...
for 1.2 million which allows the project to continue but was insufficient to pay off debts.[
As of 22 January 2021, it is no longer a social network website, it now operates merely as a gateway for Lastminute.com to sell its products.
]
History
WAYN was founded in 2002 in London
London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...
by Jérome Touze (Co-CEO), Peter Ward (Co-CEO) and Mike Lines (CTO), after two of them came up with the idea to connect people based on their location while having a few beers in their local pub.
WAYN initially grew through word-of-mouth and reached almost 50,000 members by the end of 2004. Following its relaunch in May 2005 it reached over 2.5 million members by the end of 2005. On 26 March 2012 the site claimed "over 19.1m members".Friends Reunited
Friends Reunited was a portfolio of social networking websites based upon the themes of reunion with research, dating and job-hunting. The first and eponymous website was created by a husband-and-wife team in the classic back-bedroom Internet s ...
.
In 2006, the WAYN Founders managed to complete a Series A Fund Raising of $11 million from DFJ Esprit
Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) is an American venture capital firm focused on investments in enterprise, consumer and disruptive technologies. In January 2019, DFJ Venture, the early-stage team, spun out and formed Threshold Ventures. DFJ Growth ...
and attracting famous internet entrepreneurs such as Brent Hoberman
Brent Shawzin Hoberman (born 25 November 1968) is a British entrepreneur and investor. During the dot-com boom, he co-founded lastminute.com with Martha Lane Fox in 1998, where he was CEO from its inception, before selling the business to Sab ...
(ex founder of lastminute.com), Hugo Burge (CEO of cheapflights.co.uk), Adrian Critchlow and Andy Phillips (ex founders of Active Hotels) and Constant Tedder
Jagex Limited is a British video game developer and publisher based at the Cambridge Science Park in Cambridge, England. It is best known for ''RuneScape'' and ''Old School RuneScape'', both free-to-play massively multiplayer online role-play ...
(ex CEO of Jagex
Jagex Limited is a British video game developer and publisher based at the Cambridge Science Park in Cambridge, England. It is best known for ''RuneScape'' and ''Old School RuneScape'', both free-to-play massively multiplayer online role-playi ...
, an online gaming company) and was referred to at the time as the ' MySpace of Travel'.
As of 2015, the site claimed to have over 20 million users.
Services
WAYN users may post photos from their trips. Registered users send and receive messages using email
Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant ...
, discussion forum
An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least temporar ...
s, E-card
E-card is an electronic postcard or greeting card, with the primary difference being that it is created using digital media instead of paper or other traditional materials. E-cards are made available many different ways, usually on various Inter ...
s, SMS
Short Message/Messaging Service, commonly abbreviated as SMS, is a text messaging service component of most telephone, Internet and mobile device systems. It uses standardized communication protocols that let mobile devices exchange short text ...
, and instant messages
Instant messaging (IM) technology is a type of online chat allowing real-time text transmission over the Internet or another computer network. Messages are typically transmitted between two or more parties, when each user inputs text and trigge ...
and Q&A. WAYN provides a destination browsing service to discover ''Where to go next'' and WAYN members can interact with each other and ask questions on the destinations through a Questions & Answers service. The site also provides ''Social Opinions'' which generated over 25,000 opinions daily in 2014.Booking.com
Booking.com, headquartered in Amsterdam, is one of the largest online travel agencies. It is a subsidiary of Booking Holdings.
History
In 1996, Geert-Jan Bruinsma, a student at Universiteit Twente, founded Bookings.nl.
In 2000, Booking.com w ...
to offer hotels booking to its users as well as Viator to offer tours and activities booking.
Contact import
Like many other social media sites, WAYN encourages its users to invite their friends which in turn leads to the contacts of the members to receive an invitation to join. In 2006, some members have vented their frustration claiming they were not aware that an invitation would be sent to their contacts. The company acknowledged that this process could be improved and has since changed the way in which these invitations get generated and has also signed up with Return Path, one of the few white listing companies in the world which certifies Emails Best Practice.[
]
Use
WAYN Alexa Internet
Alexa Internet, Inc. was an American web traffic analysis company based in San Francisco. It was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon.
Alexa was founded as an independent company in 1996 and acquired by Amazon in 1999 for $250 million in stock. ...
traffic ranking was 12,251 as of March 2017 down more than 2,000 position from the prior year.
Monetisation
WAYN.com commercialises its website through advertising and integrated brand engagement solutions. The site also offers a membership service (VIP) for users who wish to access to travel and lifestyle benefits. More recently, the site launched a travel booking service for users to book their hotels and tours globally.[
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References
Further reading
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Wayn (Website)
British social networking websites
British travel websites