I just received an email from Peter & Jerome, WAYN.com founders, announcing their new release and having reached the 15 million member milestone. WAYN, “Where Are You Now”, is a social network that has always focused on connecting people from around the world.

Here’s a cool video you’ll find playing on their homepage; they do a great job “painting a picture” of the experiences you can get by being a WAYN Member:

Here are screenshots of their new site (above) compared to its old version:

Besides getting rid of the wacky cartoon character from their logo, here are some of the new hot features youll find with the new WAYN.com:

• Create a plan telling your friends what you are up for doing and invite your mates to join you!
• Twitter and Facebook integration. Synchronise your WAYN account with Facebook and Twitter and share your plans with all your friends
• Friends of your friends. Find out who from your friends are already using WAYN
• Improved Website Layout & Navigation. Improved taxonomy making it easier to browse
• Travel Tools. Aiding you on your travels.

Despite the cleaner look and newly added features, I wonder if their new look and feel is already too little too late when you look at some traffic statistics compared to TravBuddy.com, a social networking web site specializing in connecting travellers.

TravBuddy.com was launched in 2005 and allows users to find travel buddies planning to travel to the same places at the same times, create travel based blogs, upload travel photos and review bars, restaurants, hotels and attractions. If you’ve never seen that featured on TravBuddy.com, I would seriously check it out; its really really cool. As of today, TravBuddy.com has 1,558,666 registered users (proudly posted on their homepage) compared to 15 million WAYN.com members. Despite WAYN.com’s much larger member numbers, the number of unique visitors to their site is taking a dip.

Let’s have a look at site analytics chart I pulled from Compete.com (WAYN.com vs TravBuddy.com):

(click to see the a larger image and year over year data)

I keep a close eye on the multitude of social networks; which ones are popular in North America, Asian, Europe, etc. One in particular, TravBuddy.com, is I’ve known for a while whom I would consider to be WAYN.com’s direct competitor when it comes to a traveller’s social network.

Over the past year, WAYN.com has seen a yearly change of -38.79% from March 2008 to March 2009 and a monthly change of -35.26% from February to March 2009. In TraBuddy.com’s case, the number of unique users to their site has actually increased 87.25% over last year. Despite WAYN.com’s drop in unique users, it will be interesting to see if their facelift will help them retain their users and regain their spot over TravBuddy.com