Travel is about to get social. No, the *other* social.

A few weeks ago I was having dinner with a friend who, while deciding what to eat and drink, mentioned an upcoming trip to Tokyo.  Knowing I've been there a bunch of times, she asked for recommendations on where to go and what to do.

As the conversation went on I had two thoughts on my mind. First, I knew exactly what I wanted to suggest. Stay at the Grand Hyatt, have lunch at so/ra/si/o, go up the Mori Tower late at night for great views of a never ending cityscape, walk around the back alleys of Harajuku when stores are closing. And a ton of other things. Second, I was a bit frustrated by not having a way to share these things with my friend in an awesome, 2012-type way. Instead, what usually ends up happening when people ask for travel related recommendations is I give them a simple list or add stuff to a shared google map and that's about it. No awesomeness, no nothing. And I know a certain boss of mine keeps a couple of word documents on hand whenever people ask for recommendations on what to do in San Francisco, New York or Stockholm. Word documents are kind of a 90's thing so, yes, clearly something is missing.

Sure, travel-related online services have been around for a long time. Sites like Tripadvisor will happily serve up reviews on that hotel in Hong Kong, Tripit keeps track of your connection time in Frankfurt and lets you know when you and your friend happen to cross paths in Seoul. Die-hard frequent fliers dig into the forums over at Flyertalk and of course, curated, edited travel information still exist in the online world from Lonely Planet, Timeout and the like. But they're all fairly shallow in scope and the social dimensions are limited at best.

But it seems things are about to change. Social travel is booming and it's all happening as we speak. New players are popping up left and right while existing ones are racing to get to where the puck is going to be. For instance, Wenzani uses a combination of social data and content from established travel guides like Lonely Planet and Frommers. Atls taps into your Facebook account to ease sharing travel guides with friends. You create maps and fill them with places, and your friends can create mashup-maps of yours and other people's suggestions. Sounds simple enough but as always, execution is key and these guys seem to be on the right track.

And a slew of newcomers are also racing to the top of the social travel heap. Some services to keep an eye on:

Danish startup Everplaces is a mobile app that allows you to aggregate checkins from your existing location-based services (Foursquare, Path, Facebook Places and Instagram) into beautiful maps and guides that you can share with friends.  Toour, Tripbirds and Urbantag are similar services that promise to facilitate trip-planning and social "places" recommendation, but all three are currently in closed beta.

So which service did I use to create a Tokyo guide for my friend? I made her a Google map and signed up for a bunch of private betas while I sit back and watch the social travel app race unfold. A year from now there will surely be a clear winner, but right now it's too soon to know which horse to bet on.