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Bing UK created a good visual search of prime ministers for the state opening of Parliament today (you'll need to install Silverlight) - and it turns out there's one for travel destinations too.

(Visual Search isn't an open-ended tool at this stage, there are just a handful of galleries that Bing has developed itself.)

It's a story best told with screengrabs:

So the first big problem is picture selection. While there are obvious ways to visually differentiate UK prime ministers (their faces) it isn't always that simple with travel. The enlarged section is the thumbnail for Hawai'i's Big Island. A clear visual clue? Not to me.

We drill down using category filters on the left, again enlarged, and get a flat gallery with some text cues. (You can also move up or down in the taxonomy by hovering over an image, which opens up a little sub-menu.)

Subsequent screens resemble this one, but with fewer 'results' as you refine your 'search'.

I use scare quotes because, as I said, this is a static gallery and not a true search tool - but it leads to true search results, because the endpoint of this process is a page of standard Bing results for the image you clicked on.

Hit the thumbnail for Bath, UK, and you'll get...

...organic search results for Bath, UK.

Clearly this is experimental, and it's a nice interface. I'm sure there are some more sophisticated ways it could work in the travel market - 'destinations' is after all as broad as it gets...

Twitterthanks: @alisongow, who retweeted the UK PMs gallery from MSN UK executive producer @peterbale.

Neither of these is hot off the press, but it is worth putting them side by side.

• Top travel sites show poor load times [Travolution]
• Site speed: Google's next ranking factor [Search Engine Land]

The latter refers to organic search results - i.e. the 'proper' results, not the paid-for slots right at the top or over at the side.

Big deal? Well, Google only said they may start using site speed, and Search Engine Land goes on to say:

If I had to guess, page speed would not be a tremendously weighed factor, unless the site takes 90 seconds to load

...and the worst load time in the Gomez study that Travolution reported was 30 seconds. So this isn't going to bring anybody's business down.

But every little helps, and a quick load time is important regardless of SEO impact.

For those who want to improve, econsultancy wrote a quick guide to some of the issues that impact load time in the wake of the Google story. 

Ok - Heathrow is some 24 hours in to Twitter, and already there's a strong interaction to flag up:

@seany85 said that Terminal 3 stinks:

@heathrowairport replied that the facilities team were on the case:

@seany85 responded with more details, and mentioned a job interview.

@heathrowairport promised to pass on his comments and wished him luck.

Which shows that:

• Heathrow is using search to monitor mentions (the first message wasn't an @)
• It is replying (sounds simple, doesn't always happen)
  
• It is replying with details of action - not just platitudes
  

It seems to have missed the difference between 'real' replies and just writing @[username] - meaning it's harder to track back on conversations.

That could be an issue with HootSuite, which appears to be the client Heathrow is using - I have no experience of it. Anyone?

Otherwise, an impressive start. The problem will be volume. As Heathrow - which has a claim to be the busiest airport in the world - starts to gain traction and its follower roster swells, it may find it hard to be this attentive to everyone...

Update: Cambuslangtravel.com now has a bare-bones announcement and a link to ABTA. But the criticisms below still stand... (2pm, August 27)

Cambuslang Travel, which isn't that well known nationally but is a sizeable Scottish agency, has gone down, leaving hundreds of potential lost bookings.

"Fear grips East Kilbride holidaymakers," says a local paper. Let's hope none of those worried holidaymakers tried going to Cambuslang Travel's website for clarification or reassurance, because they would have got this:

Bobcat.

Refresh the site and you'll get another word on roughly the same theme - cue two minutes of chatter as colleagues piped up with "I've got 'jackal'", "I've got 'elf'" and so on. What fun.

Or rather, what an insult to customers caught in the company's wake.

Chloe Berman, who covered the story for us, wrote that

Frustrated holidaymakers have been phoning the company and visiting the two retail shops in Cambuslang and East Kilbride with no success

...so things are no better outside the digital realm. So much for the new age of communication. I've said it before, but it's about the people, not the tools.

If you're affected, your best bet is to contact ABTA, or speak to your credit card provider about recovering your money.

In the profile-based social networking world, things are pretty clear - at least once you're old enough to put MySpace and Bebo out of the picture: it's LinkedIn for business, Facebook for pleasure.

Not so the status-driven world, in which Twitter controls the horizontal and the vertical.

I'll just post these real-life scenarios and leave it hanging...

Scenario 1

You've heard about problems at an airport. You're going to tweet about it anyway, but it could also affect your clients.

Whether or not you think of yourself as a 'brand', the benefits of them hearing about this through you rather than, say, the BBC are obvious.

In this scenario, you want clients following you - they get an extra bit of service at little or no cost to you.

Scenario 2

As everyone does from time to time, you need to blow off some steam. You want to do it within earshot of people who are likely to sympathise.

You're smart enough not to name clients, but you still don't want people to see you moaning about your bookings.

In this scenario, you definitely don't want clients following you.

Third-party clients like Tweetdeck, Hootsuite and Thwirl will help you manage multiple accounts.

Eighteen months on, I still remember reading this article about (literary) character in the Guardian's print edition - not just because I like books, but because it uses a great and transferable phrase of Ford Maddox Ford's: 'to get [a character] in'.

In other words: to show at a stroke who a character is and how he or she operates.

Ford and his friend Joseph Conrad loved a sentence from a Guy de Maupassant story: "He was a gentleman with red whiskers who always went first through a doorway."

Ford comments: "that gentleman is so sufficiently got in that you need no more of him to understand how he will act. He ... can get to work at once."

The phrase came back to me while profiling travel inspiration site Joobili (and on Twitter) for Travolution, because it strikes me that it achieves something comparable.

If you haven't seen Joobili, pop to the homepage now. Move the prominent slider around a bit.

I'm willing to bet you understood what was going on before you even touched the slider; when the events beneath it shuffle in response to new date parameters, you can't fail to get the point.

The site's designers have 'got it in', and it can 'get to work right away'.

Interestingly, this neat focal point didn't emerge, let alone come centre stage, until the site was in beta - and it was part of a honing process that saw certain features stripped back to allow the site's central premise room to breathe.

NB - Alex Bainbridge tells me on Twitter that there's a technical term for this: affordance.

NB: Don't look for the Travo profile yet - coming in the September issue.

From the New York Times:

A new report, to be released Tuesday by Forrester Research, found that far from embracing the do-it-yourself era, many consumers were fed up with the complicated process of planning and booking travel

Should make interesting reading. Some thoughts and questions leap out:

1. These complaints are about complexity, not about online booking per se. The will to book online is there. Used to be that security fears were the big stumbling block, which meant the will wasn't even there. (Though never assume that those days could not return.)
   
   
2. Frustration from what? Slow loading? Poorly-worded instructions? Bad design? They can be fixed, but...
   
   
3. ...does the economic situation mean they won't be? It costs money. Estimates of what all this costs in lost bookings would be interesting.
   
   
4. ...even if they are fixed, is there a bedrock of complexity beyond which we can't go? If so, how close to it have we come?
   
   
5. Seriously though, how good was the study sample at data entry?
   
   
6. Okay, scratch that last one.

Hoping that nobody in travel has paid too much attention to news of the report 15-year-old Matthew Robson penned for Morgan Stanley.

It's rather surprising that a major investment bank is floored by 'teens don't use Twitter,' 'teens don't like advertising' and 'teens prefer to get things for free'. They didn't know those things?

Perhaps most surprising is Morgan Stanley's readiness to treat one 15-year-old's notes as if they are a meaningful sample. The Guardian asked some other teenagers and got different answers.

Ask a third teenager and you'll get a third set of answers. Ask another 997, analyse the data, and you might have something worth reporting.

Okay, this video just shows Dutch start-up Layar using GPS data to display locally relevant results - something any standard GPS software already does (I can do similar stuff with Nokia Maps on my N95, for instance).

But it's doing it with a very appealing interface, isn't it?

It's currently available in the Netherlands for phones using the Android operating system, originally developed by Google. 

Imagine it will be more resource-hungry than alternatives that don't use the camera or have zippy visuals, so battery life may be an issue.

Wonder too how much stress testing they've been able to do - is it going to slow down when faced with the density of bars, restaurants etc in big city centres? 

Thanks to Donald Strachan (@hackneye) on Twitter for the catch - check out his piece on travel apps for the Telegraph.

[Sarcasm begins]

Just so you all know - I'm abandoning Twitter following Harvard findings that 10% of users create 90% of content.

I follow just short of 200 people from all walks of the travel industry, and they regularly share great links and make me think and laugh.

But what good is that now I know there are 9 million people out there not posting at all?

The idea of missing out on all the things they might theoretically post if they were a) part of my community of interest or b) interested in participating is too much to bear.

Some of you might be content to use Twitter to keep up with a sensible number of interesting people, but I was in it for those 10 million voices. Every one.

See you in the print letters pages.

[Sarcasm ends]