"We've had to keep it under wraps for a long time, " says Nolan, founder and chief executive of Dublin-based Web Reservations International.

Established in 1999, WRI is an Irish dotcom bubble survivor and thriver as the parent company for travel industry websites including Hostelworld. com, WorldRes. com, Trav. com, and Hostels. com.

The subterfuge was necessary because of the negative connotations associated with the Boo. com name. It harks back to 2000, to the first ignominious dotcom business bust in Europe, when Boo's original owners, London-based Swedish fashionistas Ernst Malmsen and Kajsa Leander, presided over a highly-publicised online branded clothing retail fiasco that burned stg�100m in only 18 months.

Books have been written on the Boo saga, but for Nolan, the value of Boo is literally in its brevity. The 45-year-old believes three-letter domain names are the holy grail of web addresses "because they're short, sharp, cool", and . . . perhaps more importantly . . . easily transferable to non-Roman characters such as Chinese logographs.

Nolan rose to prominence in the late 1980s with his Raven Computing timesheet technology for lawyers, and sold his billing system venture Coretime to business software giant Sage in 2004.

After presiding over several online travel services since the late 1990s, and arranging travel for more than 12,000,000 people across 150 countries with WRI, the programmer-turned-entrepreneur's Boo. com enterprise is an accumulation of that experience packaged behind a next-generation user interface. It looks and feels more like a MySpace or a Bebo than a common or garden internet travel tool. Nolan claims it does more, and has an attention-grabbing name to boot.

"I would argue that Boo. com is much better than sex. com, and you could argue some of the other great domain names also have two 'O's in them."

So will we be 'Boogling' our travel requirements in future? Nolan certainly hopes so, and Boo is a new departure for the $7bn online travel industry as it combines elements of social networking, user-generated peer reviews, dynamic advertising, maps and the whole Web 2.0 shebang within a sector-specific vertical search engine.

Instead of working like a traditional travel aggregator, the Ajax web technology powering Boo. com allows users to narrow down their requirements before being sent through to the independent website of the chosen hotel.

Boo takes a 10% commission on hotel bookings placed through it, or charges hoteliers a 1 'clickthrough' fee for traffic sent to their own online reservation desks. More than 50,000 hotel websites are signed up to Boo. com "The hotels love Boo because instead of paying high commissions they're paying per click, so they can get a booking for less than a dollar whereas they could be paying $50 or $60 for a regular online booking [by commission]."

Nolan admits Boo's click-through revenue is outstripping commission fees, as Boo. com users circumvent the 'circle of gloom'. This he defines as the online spadework necessary for consumers to discover more information on one of the thousands of search results a Google or travel aggregator query might present for, say, hotels in Prague.

"Individual hotel websites will always carry more info [than travel aggregators] and if you like the look of the hotel entry you're reading, you'll still have to go to a review site to get opinion, or if you don't like the look of it, you'll have to start at the beginning of this long process to find another."

Nolan's pitch is that this online chore spoils pleasure of researching online. "We thought if we could find a way of mixing search, comparison, review and the ability to go directly to the hotel's own website, all from one site, then we could replace all the bit players in that circle of gloom."

The social networking aspect of the idea is not just a gimmick, says the Dubliner, but puts reviews in context, allowing holiday makers to investigate the veracity of the reviewer: other places they've been, their interests and their general profile . . .whether business traveller or backpacker.

"A hotel might have rated 85% altogether, but people like me only rated it 65%, " says Nolan.

Boo launched last month with one million reviews harvested from existing WRI sites and currently has 1.1 million uploaded.

"There could be a million reviews on any site, but if it's by someone I know or relate to I'm much more likely to trust it."

In essence it is almost like a popularity contest for hotels.

"For the Expedias of this world and the more standard sites we run, the comparison engines are very important where you can see like-for-like, where you can compare facilities or location or brochure content. But when you're down to your last two or three hotels, you want to see what they're really all about and whether or not they have a better price on their own site . . . lots of them do . . .although they are usually harder to find."

Nolan is quick to counter the charge that online social networking is just for teenagers to achieve digital popularity and pass notes at the back of their increasingly virtual classrooms. Instead, he sees it as a viable business model applicable to other lucrative online activities. These range from internet dating to job-seeking and property-hunting.

"It is mature because it's not about us chatting and dropping little notes on our desktops and all that Bebo kids' stuff. It's about me putting up the ten things I did in a certain place or my five favourite hotels. For example, I have a shortlist of certain hotels I like in London, so my PA can just press one button and get a list of just those hotels."

Nolan may be ahead of the posse in terms of bringing the social networking phenomenon to mainstream e-commerce, but he recognises the novelty of his ambition.

"It's not going to be an overnight thing and it's going to take some time, " he confesses.

What user-generated and peer-reviewed feedback does add is what Nolan calls 'collective wisdom' and a comparative aspect that mainstream search engines cannot currently provide.

"You need a comparison engine because all hotel websites look different. Therefore, even if Google could give you just 300 real hotel websites in Prague, the comparison process would kill you because they all look different and you can't get around that."

Nolan says Boo. com will get around this problem because it can rapidly whittle down a selection while specifying particular requirements.

In reality the business opportunity driving Nolan and his young team of 100 staff . . . 85 in Dublin and the rest spread across Shanghai, Sydney, and San Mateo . . . is the huge boom in internet search engine advertising.

"Vertical search is where it's at. Google couldn't do Boo right now because it can't do database searches, so there are plenty of 'nichey' search engines. Google has shown us all one thing: if you get the user interface right, people will use your product."

The original fashion retail Boo. com failed because its interface was cumbersome and bandwidth-hungry. Thus Boo is Nolan's foray into harnessing the power of existing technology to deliver what busted dot-commers envisaged, albeit for travel rather than trousers and tops.

His resurrection of a failed URL might become a footnote in marketing history, but it is this reversal of an accepted PR mantra . . . don't associate with failure . . . which, ironically perhaps, is gaining him publicity in the busy technology space.

"Those [failed] companies in the dotcom arena learned the hard way, whereas we chipped away by organic growth and not spending other people's money, and we've evolved into a pretty profitable company. The thing is, when I showed this idea to my staff [mostly aged in their mid- 20s], most of them looked at me blankly, going: 'what is Boo. com?

It's a great name. We don't know its history'."

Nolan says his greatest asset is a young staff of 'digital natives', and says ideas are generated every from within the company.

"Do you know any three letter domains for sale?" he asks.

CV
RAY NOLAN

Age: 45
Family: Married to Siobhan with three children
Career: 1999-present: CEO and founder, WRI; 19872004: founder and chief executive, Coretime/Raven Computing
Hobbies: Rugby, tennis

WEB RESERVATIONS INTERNATIONAL
Founded: 1999
Turnover (2006): 31.5m
Estimated turnover (2007): 42m
Pre-tax profit (2006): 19.1m
Employees: c100