Tripl heads to the iPhone/iPad, lets you track your friends’ trips with style

After launching a web app last month for charting your friends’ travels via social media, New York City-based Tripl is today announcing a free new app for the iPhone and iPad.

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Tripl’s apps are the cure for the staycation blues: They connect to your Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and other social media accounts to keep you informed of where your friends are traveling through beautiful daily digests. The company also recently added support for Instagram, which has buoyed the amount of geo-tagged data in Tripl’s database.

While there’s a good chance Tripl’s apps will make you seethe with jealousy, the company hopes to inspire users to travel more as well.

Getting started with Tripl’s iPhone and iPad apps is easy: Simply log in with your Facebook account, then connect to your other social media accounts from within the apps. The apps sport a simple and elegant interface — building on the company’s gorgeous web app — allowing you to scroll through your friends’ travel stories. You can comment, bookmark, and like stories on your feed. And since Tripl is pulling information from existing social media sites, your friends don’t have to be signed up to Tripl for their data to show up.

In many ways, Tripl’s data works better on the small screen, since it’s just a swipe away from the apps powering its travel data. Tripl founder and CEO Peter Sullivan tells me the company “relies 100 percent on mobile data,” so it’s paying special attention to its mobile experience. He also hinted that the company is working on new mobile features that will be useful once you’re on a trip.

Founded in 2009 in Stockholm, Sweden, Tripl was initially focused on pairing travelers with locals. Last month, it pivoted to focus on friend travel stories. The company has since learned just how valuable its travel data is, which is enticing travel companies to integrate with its technology, Sullivan said. Tripl boasts that it has analyzed and indexed more than 500,000 trips so far and has filtered through more than 2 million pieces of geo-tagged content.

The company was a member of DreamIt Venture’s NYC summer class and will be on-stage tomorrow at DreamIt’s demo day.

Tripl raised $300,000 from three angel investors in Sweden last year as well as $300,000 in debt financing from High Peak Venture Partners and Quotidian Capital in March. The company has also received a private investment from a pro poker player, as well as a grant from the Swedish government.