Not sure where to turn or who to trust when it comes to online travel reviews? Brace yourself. On Tuesday, shareholders of Expedia.com approved the company’s spinoff of TripAdvisor.com, setting the stage for what could be the next era in online travel advice.

The transition, which is expected be completed by the end of the year, won’t directly affect the user experience on TripAdvisor. Rather, it’s a recognition of the fact that the two companies operate under very different business models — Expedia’s business is built on transactions; TripAdvisor’s on advertising — and that separating the two will benefit both.

As Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told analysts earlier this year, “We believe that moving ahead as two separate companies will allow each to stand on its own, drive it's own growth in technology, vision and culture, and ultimately, create far more value for our shareholders.”

“It’s an opportune time to do it,” Carroll Rheem, director of research at PhoCusWright, told msnbc.com. “TripAdvisor is ready for its next phase of evolution.”

The site has more than 50 million reviews, 44 million unique monthly visits and $485 million in revenue in 2010, according to a recent investors’ presentation.

Even so, a host of startups have launched recently under the premise that TripAdvisor’s model — millions of reviews from anonymous strangers — is outdated in these socially networked times. Instead of listening to strangers, they say, why not turn to your existing social networks on sites such as Facebook or Foursquare and get advice from people you already know and trust?

“Traditional [user-review] sites tend to mash everyone together,” said Travis Katz, co-founder and CEO of Gogobot.com, one of many sites built on the concept of friendsourcing. “The idea is to help you get trusted and personal advice by tapping into your friends and people like you.”

But friendsourcing also has its pitfalls, said Rheem. “Unless you have the most well-traveled friends in the world, they probably haven’t stayed in every hotel you’re considering or visited every destination you’re interested in,” she said.

Instead, look for more sites to opt for a combination of crowdsourcing, friendsourcing and whatever other sourcing they can access. Last year, for example, TripAdvisor launched Trip Friends, which augments the site’s anonymous reviews with insights from users’ Facebook friends. And Gogobot, which recently received $15 million in new funding, is working on creating a “recommendation engine” that will utilize multiple sources to create what Katz likens to a Pandora for travel.

“Friendsourcing is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Ryan Williams, director of client services, travel, for Compete.com, a marketing research company. “A lot of sites will start to leverage the power of your friends’ friends; if each of them has 500 friends, that’s a lot of people to tap into.

“If a review site can tap into that, they’ll do well.”

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Rob Lovitt is a longtime travel writer who still believes the journey is as important as the destination. Follow him at Twitter.