Weyup: for China’s Day-Trippers to Compare Notes, Ask Questions [UPDATED: It’s a Clone]

[UPDATE, 12/02: I’ve been emailed by the folks at Gogobot.com who point out that Weyup is a pretty shameless, pixel-by-pixel rip-off of its own site, which is over a year old. Though we support clever localization of a service, a blatant clone is pretty mean and exploitative. We saw the same issue in October, with the local startup Pengyou totally stealing Path’s website.]

With interest – and financial potential – now booming in the travel and leisure industries in mainland China, it’s inevitable that some startups are rising to the challenge of making a business out of networking day-trippers and holiday-makers. Weyup is one such attempt – a vertical social media site that sort of combines Quora and Tripadvisor whilst keeping it fun and useful.

Weyup – which allows third-party sign-up with seven platforms, from MSN (NASDAQ:MSFT) to Renren (NYSE:RENN) – lets people connect with like-minded travelers, ask and answer questions, plan out a trip, and perhaps even connect with a fellow user whilst on your journey. The startup’s site concentrates on listing accommodation, sights, hotels, food, and shops. There’s no accompanying mobile app as of yet.

There’s a lot of depth to the site, and the user-generated content covers most of the globe. Surprisingly, there’s no e-commerce element to it, and no clear monetization strategy. Overall, it’s a very nice community, and it’s also good to see a startup that actually has some content and a profound usefulness, in contrast to all-show-and-no-go ventures that have fancy apps that leave me scratching my head and thinking what’s the point in this?

Baidu Travel (left) vs Weyup (right) in terms of social-minded traveling sites.

The only trouble is that the big boys are doing this already. Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU), the country’s biggest search engine, already has a nice-looking travel portal (pictured above on the left) that has a lot of the social and Q&A functions that Weyup has. (In fairness, I think Baidu did it first). Plus, Baidu has invested over US$300 million in the online travel agency Qunar, so it’s damn serious about the travel sector, and probably about its socially-minded travel portal as well.

Baidu’s travel section already seems to be winning, if you compare it with Weyup on the sight-page for the historic and picturesque village of Lijiang, in Yunnan province. On Baidu’s site, 1,437 users have been on a trip to the village, while on Weyup just 607 of its peeps have been there.

Give Weyup a go, starting on its homepage.