Leading travel, location and lifestyle social networking site WAYN.com (Where Are You Now?) has developed a widget enabling third parties to gain access to their 13.5 million member global community.

The announcement was made this week at the e-Business Academy in Lillehammer, Norway.

Selected partners will now be able to deliver own-branded versions of WAYN’s location-based online community via widgets on their own sites.

The widget will enable third parties to deliver location-based search results, offering their users the ability to see who’s where, research locations, explore profiles, view photos, trips and reviews, all based on their whereabouts.

Social networking is known for strong user engagement, high repeat traffic and retention. By providing this fully customisable widget WAYN hopes to provide traditional websites with an opportunity to gain an instantly involved community, without having to build it themselves from scratch.

The aim is to help location-centric entities maximise the attraction of their offering through people and user generated content. Retailers such as flight operators and hotel sites will also be able to reduce drop-off and encourage their users to interact post-purchase.

On average, WAYN users spend 16 minutes on site per visit, return twice per month, and view approximately 30 pages per session. The standard ecommerce transactional site would receive around 5 page views per user and fewer repeat visits from consumers.

“We have the largest location-based social networking community in the world. Users log their trips, share experiences, find out who’s coming to their town, and meet new friends in far flung destinations they’re about to visit” comments Matt Jerwood, WAYN’s director of business development “By offering whitelabelling services we’re giving other forms of e-business the opportunity to gain from the strengths of social networking through the use of an add-on. We want to initiate partnerships which result in engagement on non-community sites and non-traditional distribution of the WAYN.com community via innovative and open minded companies.”

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For more information please contact:

Annika Erskine
020 7336 8088
Annika.erskine@wayn.com

About WAYN.com WAYN.com (Where Are You Now?) is the world's largest travel and lifestyle focused social networking community website. The site operates in 193 countries and membership has grown from 45,000 users in March 2005 to 13.5 million today. WAYN.com allows its members to keep track of their friends' whereabouts and make new friends based on where they are now, where they have been and where they’re going. Top services on WAYN.com include travel guide and trip planning tools, unlimited photo and video storage; interaction tools such as email, SMS and instant messenger, forums and travel related tools and products.