Somebody asked recently what I meant when I said lots of startups make things for technically-inclined twenty-something males. I meant that lots of startups make things like this. If your first thought after "I kind of want to go out to dinner on Thursday." is "I wonder if a site exists that can broadcast this to my social networks yet?", you are solidly in the demographic most B2C startups seem to care about.
There are also people who, when they think "I want to go out to dinner on Thursday.", follow it up with "Naturally, I will bring my husband and children." These people do not have an endless stream of Silicon Valley companies trying to satisfy their every whim. That is a pity, or opportunity, depending on how you look at it.
Most of the people I know in their 30s and 40s married with kids are completely desperate for more social opportunities.
This is the sort of thing where you can see that Marge and Dave from a couple streets over are going out to dinner Saturday and it's a chance to join in.
Given the way physical communities just aren't communities these days, this sort of site is a chance to reverse that.
Who do you think is on facebook and twitter anyway?
So many start ups are expecting users to broadcast their lives and reveal even more info than what's already floating around on the internet.
Personally, I think that people will begin backing away from these types of start ups and will become less inclined to reveal anything about themselves. It's just too much.
Of course not everyone is going to want to broadcast every move they are going to make, but that isn't half of what Plancast can offer you.
For example, a couple weeks ago I learned that Marcy Playground had released a new CD and was touring. I was bumbed I missed their show simply because I didn't know about it.
Now, if Marcy Playground was on Plancast I could've just subscribed to their upcoming feed and easily have seen where they were going to be and when they were going to be there.
Now, how awesome would it be if all your favorite bands were on Plancast? You could create a feed of just bands you liked and have their tour schedules come to you.
But let's not stop at bands, what about your favorite clubs or restaurants? You could create a custom upcoming feed of only the places you want to go.
Give Plancast a chance and you might just grow to love it.
I use last.fm to "scrobble" all of the music I listen to. It knows what artists I like, any similar artists to those, and most tour dates. There is even an "events" page that lists all of these shows, filterable by geo and artists that I might actually like. This has solved all of my "didn't know they were on tour" problems.
I think I would feel like a puppet who's strings are being jerked in 20 directions by all my different "feeds".
But that's probably just me. I have never seen the allure of the "social" internet that puts ever facet of your life on line. It seems to be to be the height of arrogance to think that anyone really cares about where you are going to dinner on Thursday night.
Plancast needs support for uncertainty. I might be going to this place sometime next week but I'm not sure yet. Perhaps if a friend also says they're going then I'll be more certain.
Similar to upcoming.org's interested vs attending.
- Really lovely site. Lots of great touches. I typed that I will be going to Bar Wotever (actually the name of a night, not a place) tonight and it figured out where the venue is automatically.
- Could the little red bars next to each time window (today, next week etc.) give some idea of futureness? e.g. green for today, yellow for this week, red for further away in time.
- Can I hide a friend's plan?
- If I'm on the Discover Friends page, the data does not refresh when I switch between the Twitter/Facebook/Email tags. To do that, I must refresh the whole page in my browser.
whoa. that signup was extremely frictionless with both twitter and facebook. i already found friends and plans i share with them without doing anything really. i'm impressed.
Even with pre-population, I would have to give them an e-mail address and create a new password. Sorry, I'm not joining until my friends make me. And given that I'm just barely still in my 20s, not bloody likely.
Very impressed by the date handling. I entered Thursday to Saturday and it figured out what I meant.
However, I can't make it understand ranges further in the future. For example, I'm going to All Tomorrow's Parties from 11th Dec to 13th Dec and I can't make Plancast understand that.
Funny story, turns out I forgot to commit our latest date_parser before Thanksgiving break and then accidentally over-wrote it with the one from the repository because I thought it would be the most up to date.
So, the current date parser has some bugs that were caught and fixed and then lost. The good news is I have re-fixed most of all those bugs and I just tested "11th Dec to 13th Dec" and it parsed it correctly. The new parser should be pushed live in a day or so.
I really like the idea, but the feature mentioned at the end of the post to allow limiting plans to certain friends is a must have - many of my plans I won't want the whole world to know about.
We have been going back and forth on how to do this, the problem is we really don't want to clutter the simpleness of "what, when, where" with lots of other dialog boxes, so we are trying to find the best way to integrate advanced functionality like privacy and still remain simple.
While we don't have full integration yet, every page does offer an iCal feed so you can at least subscribe to your Plancast feed in Gcal to get a one-way stream going.
We're working on it, judging by the amount of emails we're getting about an API, I'm thinking we're going to drop all our other upcoming features to get the API up and running for everyone.
The only thing that stands in our way are all the bug reports we've gotten also.
There are also people who, when they think "I want to go out to dinner on Thursday.", follow it up with "Naturally, I will bring my husband and children." These people do not have an endless stream of Silicon Valley companies trying to satisfy their every whim. That is a pity, or opportunity, depending on how you look at it.