Thorn Tree - The Story So Far
Posted at 04:47AM Aug 03, 2007 by CarolB
The Thorn Tree's origins stretch way back to early 1996 when Lonely Planet Online was still in its infancy and Web 2.0 concepts like "social networking" were but a twinkle in a motherboard's eye. Its then manager took some wires and cables he found lying around the office floor and hooked our travelling community into lonelyplanet.com's first online talkfest. Some time in 1997 the Thorn Tree was transformed into a fully fledged bulletin board.
The name Thorn Tree was taken from the famous Nairobi café where travellers would pin messages on a notice board that surrounded the trunk of the large acacia tree outside. Within no time at all, the Thorn Tree was bubbling with travel advice, community interaction, organised get-togethers (referred to in TT parlance as pissups) and its fair share of internet trolls. In this wild west of the early internet, where users could post anonymously and registration didn't require a valid email address, there were frequent flame wars which at times had Thorn Tree resembling Bedlam more than a travel forum. Many of our pre-registration long-time users still refer to this time as the good old days of the Thorn Tree.
In 2000 it became necessary to register to contribute to the Thorn Tree and our anonymous users either disappeared back into the ether or became fully fledged members of our traveller community.
Travellers can form strong bonds on the road that become life-long friendships. In a similar way, the Thorn Tree has brought together travellers both on and off the road from around the globe. It’s this unique blend of community, which mixes hard travel information with more informal discussion, that has seen the Thorn Tree become one of the most popular and authoritative travel forums on the web.
The Tree is split into categories which cover destination-specific and specialist-interest branches. With over 100,000 active threads, there’s a lot of goodness to wade through. If you’re after something specific, try a quick search – before jumping in, as your question may already have been answered.
Want to learn more about Lonely Planet's history? That's easy. Check out About Us for the legendary tale of how our founders, Tony & Maureen Wheeler, with a few dollars in their pocket, took a beat-up old car and a sense of adventure on a journey to become the world's largest independent travel publisher.
Category: BehindTheScenes | Tags: history
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