The site needs the information from a social graph to be useful. I can see it being hooked up to G+ in the future.

yeah right now g+ doesnt give you social graph data yet, we are working on linkedin and twitter however with twitter a lot of people follow brands or people they don't know

scaling friends of friends, combined with geo location, timeframe and interest tags has been an engineer challenge but we are starting to look into other graphs like above

It frustrates me to find yet another site that is unusable without signing up through Facebook. Not everyone uses Facebook (cough, cough-- me), and some who do don't want to grant access to personal information.

Also, what makes this site any different from simply utilizing one's social graph directly on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc? Why would one need your service when he/she could just tell their Facebook friends, "Hey everyone, I'm traveling to Rome this week. Does anyone have friends there I should meet?"

I think if you have a solid answer for this, it may need to be communicated more clearly on your landing page.

On the upside, good job with the site design. That part is pretty solid for a first go.

I'm also not willing to use it until I can authenticate without giving this information:

Your profile info: birthday, hometown and location Friends' hometowns Friends' locations

I'm taking a year off work and traveling across the world for 2012 and would love to use the app but I see no reason for it to want that information.

My friends are already my friends on facebook, so I don't need them on the site, I need to find new people.

We take your friends locations in order for you to grow your network. Our goal is to link you with friends of friends for your next travel. Since the API doesn't allow us to draw this information we need your help. Thats why we base our recommendations around people.

Everytime you recommend a friend from a certain city, that friend (even if they are not using the site) will be visible to all your other friends using the service. They see that this person was recommended by you.

You too share the same benefit. You gain all your friend's recommendations. Again these people have been handpicked and selected. I know I have 10 friends in China, based on some people I have added from my masters program, but I would never really recommend them.

Thirded.

The idea looks really good and I've long wanted such a thing. In fact, I'd use it today if I could sign in. But I'm not on Facebook and know that there's no point joining Facebook just to sign in since they "need" your social graph and mine would be empty. So, no point doing that.

I'll bookmark the site and drop it into my "visit monthly" folder. On the visit that it doesn't require Facebook I'll sign up.

Thanks for the insights and we will let you know when we create a way for that to happen. Right now that social graph is really important to us in helping build you connections. Is there another service like foursquare, twitter, or linkedin that you use?

I use my e-mail which has a contact list :)