Halloween, for me, used to consist of dressing up in the same old costume and walking around the neighborhood with my brother and our cousins while we tried to get enough candy to last us the entire year.

These last few years, Halloween became a chance to gather together a group of friends and find either a house party or a professionally planned party to attend. Some good examples are the ones happening this evening in San Francisco at the Westin St. Francis, City Hall, Levende Lounge, etc. But, there are plenty of other options beyond just trick-or-treating or partying.

Here are ten alternatives I wanted to share with you (These options are more for the 21+ crowd and were compiled from variety of sources on the Internet):

1. Visit a hotel that’s haunted by a celebrity or check into a hotel with some famous deaths.
2. Host your own or go to your local movie theater to enjoy an all-night horror fest.
3. Take a little vacation to one of the 10 creepiest destinations in the world.
4. Check out a haunted house (either real or created). Most amusement parks also have some great Halloween themed activities and haunted houses.  Example, Knott’s Scary Farm.
5. Find a ghost-spotting locale to experience something supernatural or strange.
6. Put on your scariest/creepiest/weirdest costume and drive around busy streets and intersections. At every stoplight, make sure you stare at the people stopped next to you and the pedestrians trying to cross the street.
7. Try out one of the many ghost tour options in your local area.  Here’s one for Honolulu.
8. If you’re still looking for ghosts, you could always travel to one of the world’s most famous cemeteries.
9. Find a Halloween parade or festival. Too bad the Castro is no longer a viable option.
10. Stay home and scare trick-or-treaters… Or, stay home and reward trick-or-treaters with plenty of candy.

Happy Halloween everyone!

You may have noticed that something was a little different when you came back to the GoPlanit homepage recently.  That’s because we’re in the process of enhancing the flow of our main pages based on some of the feedback and comments that we’ve been receiving.  We’d love to hear what you think as we continue to improve upon the look/feel of GoPlanit.com.

I also wanted to point out some new features!  In addition to the snazzier looking home page, we’ve implemented several enhancements to help you with your travel planning experience.

1. General search - Now you can do a general search for destinations, activities, restaurants, and hotels directly from the home page.  We no longer restrict you to just cities because there are those instances where you just need a simple search to find what you’re looking for.  You can still choose whether you’d like to explore those items or create an itinerary.
2. Search nearby from the schedule & calendar view - Now you can search for nearby activities, restaurants, and hotels using any item on your current trip plan as a starting point.  To try this out, add at least one item onto your trip.  Now, click the “Add” button or anywhere on the calendar and you’ll notice that the drop-down list for “Near” (right of the “Sort” options) contains the item you just added.  You can even sort by distance to see how far those popular items are from items on your trip.
3. Sort by distance on search pages - When you do a search nearby from an item’s page, you can now sort by distance on the resulting search page.  No more figuring out how far things are.  We’ll provide you with the distance measurements as well.
4. Forums are up - We loved hearing all the feedback and comments.  And, Get Satisfaction has been great for helping us address some of the bugs and issues that users experienced.  But, we really want to offer a central place where everyone can have discussions and meaningful conversations.  That’s why we’ve launched our forums today under the “Socialize” section.  Don’t worry, there will be plenty more opportunities to socialize.  This is just the beginning.
5. Multiple destinations easier than ever - A commonly requested feature was to allow multiple destinations on one trip plan.   Since we already offered that, we figured it was probably because users didn’t see the option to add more destinations.  So, we’re trying to highlight that even further and allowing you to assign cities to specific days.  Now, you can segment out your trip so that it shows where you’re actually going to be for each day of the trip.

It’s been a wild ride since we presented at TC50 a little over a month ago. Thank you - Jason, Michael, Heather, the Mahalo team, the TechCrunch team, and everyone else who helped put on the great Conference.  It was an experience that we’ll never forget.

The aftermath has just been just as exciting.  We’ve had visitors from over 139 countries (73% of the world) visit our site in the last month.  And, we’ve had lots of articles written about us by bloggers, newspapers, individuals, etc. in just about every language.  I wanted to take this time to thank everyone for your feedback and support. We’ve got some exciting stuff planned for the next few months. And, we’re looking forward to sharing it with you all very soon. Let me know if I missed any articles/videos/etc.

About Us:

• TC50 Presentation, TechCrunch Article
• Crunchbase
• Mahalo

Tech/Travel blogs:

• Washington Post - GoPlanit generates your travel itinerary with one click
  
• CNET - GoPlanit lets you shuffle travel plans like a music playlist
  
• Lifehacker - GoPlanit plans your vacation for you
  
• CenterNetworks - Plan your trip and go
  
• VentureBeat - Cut down on the time spent planning travel arrangements
• Hotel Marketing - GoPlanit launches one-click travel planner
  
• Start-up Meme - Go Plan your trip with GoPlanit
  
• Tim’s Boot intro article, Follow-up interview - The travel representative in the TechCrunch50
  
• Walyou - A Social travel planning tool
  
• Procrastinated Adopter - “It’s definitely worth the sign-up”
  
• Digital Nomads - Like Fodor’s but free and online
  
• Oldest Living Digital Marketer - Want a great vacation?  GoPlanit!
  
• Digital Influentials - “One of the best that we saw was GoPlanit”
  
• Jon’s website of the day - Website of the day
  
• Zopilote - Easy Schedule and individual travel guide
  
• Somewhat Frank - More startups I want to try…
  
• Last Minute Travel Blog - “Your itinerary is completely personalized”
  
• Mixtt’s Blog - Favorites from TechCrunch 50
  
• Cookiemag - Trip planning for dummies
• STA Travelbuzz - STA Buzz’s best travel tools
  

Web 2.0 Listings:

• Killer Start-ups
• Listio
• Rateitall
• Web 2.0
• Tradevibes
• Webdev 2.0

Videos

• The Daily Geek (9/12)
• All About the Betas #4 (10/13)

International:

• Ehrensenf (German)
• Downloadblog.it (Italian)
• Geekissimo (Italian)
• Mytech.it (Italian)
• clicrbs (Portuguese)
• Linkk (Portuguese)
• Ida & Volta (Portuguese)
• Destinos y Sabores (Spanish)
• Incubaweb (Spanish)
• Mina de mas (Spanish)
• Viajes baratos (Spanish)
• Bitelia (Spanish)
• Despegar (Spanish)
• Urbano Vergara (Spanish)
• Reisportals (Dutch)

Sorry for the lack of blog posts the past few months, but we’ve been in ‘quiet’ mode getting ready both for our launch and the outstanding Techcrunch50 conference, where 50 of the top startup companies from over 1000 applicants all over the world were selected to present their product live on stage!

We were extremely honored to have been chosen as one of the top 50, and although we may have been a bit exhausted with everything leading up to last week, the overall experience was absolutely incredible!

It was an amazing 72 hours of mingling with some of the coolest people on the planit (GO! and watching other great companies present on stage to an audience of over 1500 media, peers, and experts in their fields.  The nightly afterparties were a great way to socialize with others in a more laid back environment, and we got a chance to see some of our idols party it up like the rockstars that they are!

And the traffic and feedback that GoPlanit has received has been amazing - in the 72 hours after we launched, we were covered by over 20 media outlets and received more visitors from more countries (120 different countries!) to our site than we had in the previous 9 months combined - OMG!

Congrats out to Mike Arrington, Jason Calacanis, and the techcrunch50 team for putting on a great event, already looking forward to attending next year’s conference!

GoPlanit launched today in front of an excellent panel and a great audience. Thanks to everyone for supporting us and please, let us know what you think of the site!

We are very excited that we were chosen as one of the finalists for TC50.  And, we’re happy to announce that we will be presenting this afternoon.  So, please watch us live this afternoon between 3:45pm-5:00pm on Techcrunch.com or ustream.tv.  We’re excited about this opportunity and can’t wait until everyone can plan their trips and go using goplanit.

So it’s been over a year since we decided to start a company that would help make people’s travel planning easier! OK, so our origins weren’t completely altruistic as each of us have experienced different frustrations in the trip planning process… and we wanted to make our lives easier too!

We’re now in private beta and have been getting some great input from a lot of our test users - thanks for all of your great feedback! Feel free to sign up on our homepage for an invite if you’d like to ‘explore’ a bit, provided that you’re willing to give us some feedback too… good, bad, or even ugly

Now we’re not a bunch of rocket scientists with backgrounds in travel from the days of the Wright brothers. But we are a team of bright, down to earth, nice & fun people who love to travel… and we’re dedicated to help make travel planning easier for everyone!

So come take us for a spin and hopefully tell your friends about us too if you like what you see. Or just let us know what would make your travel planning easier and we’ll see if we can add it to our list of things to do!

This is why we travel…

After nearly a year of planning and development, GoPlanit is ready for the bigtime (almost). We’d like to extend a warm welcome to all of our new alpha users. Thanks so much for participating, and helping us build something great!

The GoPlanit Team