Travel widgets across the web have been a natural application for Facebook and other social networks. The popularity of Trip Advisor's Cities I've Visited widget, and communities like Yelp, Driftr and Dopplr have proven that sharing travel information is one of our favorite social activities.

American Airlines developed their own Facebook widget, Travel Bag, to learn more about consumer preferences and traveling social behavior. There are three main widgets-within-a-widget in the AA Travel Bag: Favorites, Travelogue, and Trip-O-Vent. According to Media Post, American Airlines has launched this widget as an experiment, hoping to learn about consumers in order to deliver more relevant marketing messages.

If the widget is an experiment, then we recommend that American Airlines adopt the scientific method to learn from the discussion wall comments to refine and improve the experience. Early users have reported bugs, inappropriate design, lack of integration with the AA.com site for frequent travelers, and overly limited options. For example, the Trip-o-Vent feature asks you to count down to an upcoming trip, but then only offers US-based destinations. One would expect the most interesting socially networked travel discussions would occur when planning for overseas travel, as tends to be the case on Dopplr and other online travel tools.

We look forward to watching this experiment unfold.