

Plancast Is Foursquare... For The Future - hwork
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/30/plancast/

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patio11
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.

~~~
jaymon
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.

~~~
hazzen
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.

~~~
jaymon
Touche.

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iamdanw
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.

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maryrosecook
More feedback:

\- 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.

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enki
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.

~~~
ojbyrne
You found the form with 12 fields to fill in to be frictionless?

~~~
sachinag
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.

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rglullis
Wait, wait... A few hours ago I submitted a link about Sponty and how they can
compete with Foursquare. (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=969221>).

It's kind funny how the techcrunch article gets instantly lots of votes, and
link to random blogger gets ignored.

Anyway, Sponty also offers a social calendar, where you can broadcast your
intentions, and also have feeds for different events.

~~~
iamdanw
There's a large glut of "this new service is like foursquare" submissions over
the past few days.

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maryrosecook
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.

~~~
jaymon
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.

~~~
maryrosecook
Cool. Thanks a lot.

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kilps
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.

~~~
jaymon
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.

~~~
fbailey
very nicely done, we tried something similar some time ago but i never
finished it :-) good luck

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FreeRadical
This reminds me of dopplir, in essence but much more localised. I'll never use
this myself but I can see this doing well.

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dkimerling
definitely. Once they get gcal integration going, that will just take it to
the next step.

~~~
jaymon
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.

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auston
I've been a "beta" tester for this - it's pretty useful!

Congrats Mark!

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maxklein
It's an excellent idea, and in Trumps voice: This is going to be huge.

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zach
So it's a 43Things reboot?

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milkshakes
really cool -- hope they open up an api

~~~
jaymon
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.

