British Airways gives birth to user generated twins

Metrotwin headquarters
Originally uploaded by ixtlan

I'm working on Metrotwin.  It's a social bookmarking utility funded by British Airways.  We think it's pretty useful by making it easy for anyone who travels between London and New York to find the best places to enrich their experience.  It lets users create bookmarks of only the best places to experience in both cities with a clever differentiator called 'twinning' that goes much further than the offline analogue that pairs villages in different countries.  Metrotwins will eventually enable users to create lists of their favourite bars, clubs, shops, business services, etc and then find their closest equivalents in the other city.  It will be possible to plot these twins on a Google map to tell me how many of these equivalents are within a mile of my hotel.  This is different.  This is useful, and for the millions of people who travel between London and New York every year, a means of place discovery previously unknown in the travel industry.

The project is a multi-agency effort between Agency.com and BBH supported by niche social software designers Made by Many and Headshift who have introduced leading edge social design principles and technology to British Airways - Ruby on Rails, Cloud services and some other stuff I can't mention right now, but follow us at the project blog.

Metrotwin is less about BA pushing product and more about a genuine desire to provide a useful tool for all NY-LON travellers. In many respects a brand like this, given the current (and continuous) debate on climate change and the fall out from T5 is taking a brave step into a world that is totally counter-intuitive to its internal culture.  This is an authentic attempt to provide a utility for travelling citizens of both cities fully cognisant of the need to avoid being labelled as Yet Another Social Network.  Well done British Airways - you are finally Dancing with the Customer!