Orbitz on Facebook Connect – Simple and Logical

Facebook Connect has been around for a while. While some of us are still fooling around trying to find a real way to engage the Facebook audience – who’s definitely becoming tired of the overcrowded application scenary that feeds us with thousand of irrelevant quizes everyday – while other players are doing what seems right, which is using Facebook to communicate user necessities in a basic 2.0 fashion. Orbitz is one of those cases.

Having recently released a Facebook Connect application where users can share their travel plans with their friends. Not only this but it also allows friends to click on the trip in order to book their own travel, be it equal to the one they saw on Facebook. This makes group booking a lot simpler. The clever thing about this is:
1. The way it displays the brand and their product in a Facebook-friendly why. It’s not an invading application that you feel that is just another quiz, it’s actually something real (a trip a friend is making);
2. It generates opinion. Trip reviews – be it opinions on the destination or the Hotel – are the themes most commented on the web and regarded as valued knowledge coming from somebody who’s actually been to these places – it’s the basis of the 2.0.
While Orbitz is not the first vacationing app on Facebook, it definitely uses two important factors – simple and context-friendly. It is a natural fit with Facebook and users do not mix it with second rated applications. In an overcrowded social media scenario, it’s nice to actually see brands tone it down a bit and instead of creating complex in-Facebook mechanics, they just connect it in a natural way.