

Tell HN: Take My Idea - A Social Calendar - kyro

I was just now reading through the comments in the ask HN thread about a Facebook alternative and read a reply saying that there lacks a service that really nails event scheduling, which reminded me of an idea I've had for years now that I've yet to see implemented properly. I won't have time to do much of anything in grad school for the next 4 years, so hopefully one of you will find this interesting enough to implement, because I'd definitely use it.<p>The goal is to make the ultimate personal and social calendar. Events are suggested and committed to my calendar manually, via my groups/social circles, and suggestions from friends. The user joins a variety of groups, anywhere from his economics class group to the Justin Bieber fan club, and is also member of social circles that him and his friends have created - "school friends", "research team", etc. Each group/circle has their own page for group discussions, etc. Any time an authorized group member or friend in a social circle posts an event, it pops up on in the appropriate slot on my calendar. I can then choose to attend/maybe/not attend, comment, and share the event with others, all directly from my calendar. For every event that has occurred, an event page is created for photos/etc and only viewable by group/circle members. Now, I think this would be pretty huge if implemented correctly. The way I see it, the user logs in to their big calendar decorated in flashing notifications of new events occurring or being suggested. He/she also fills in personal events - "study in library"- and can organize his/her social life around that. Sharing events would be big too, I think.<p>What problem does it solve? Well, one thing I've always hated about Facebook is that it puts all my friends/acquaintances/etc on the same level, and that's not how it works. I want to rank my friends, be part of different social circles, because that's how I operate. With one group of friends I may act totally different than with another. And so a big part of this idea is giving users the freedom to create their own social circles, and define who they are by the circles they join and groups they're members of, and giving them the ability to plan their lives around that. I feel that more closely resembles how we act in real life. We attend a party with one circle, and go to the company dinner with the next, and there's little to no overlap most of the time; and a lot of the times we keep those two circles separate with a wall of privacy, for many obvious and various reasons. With this idea, you get that privacy, that control to choose which circles you're a part of, how to communicate with them, and how to plan your life around them.<p>I know this is something Google Calendar might be trying to accomplish, or what Kiko might have been intended for, but I just don't feel it's been done right. Socializr somewhat aims at doing that, but that site is crap - I've tried it. Biggest competitor is Facebook, clearly. Not sure how you'd position this properly to beat them out; I haven't thought that far ahead.
======
iamwil
Eventing, like college textbook trading, is a perennial tar pit. That's not to
say you shouldn't try, but see how and why others have failed.

One of the problems I see with what you describe is the amount of management
that I'd have to do in order to make it work, since I have different social
circles that I need different privacy settings on and each have their own page
for group discussions, and then you can choose attend/not attend, etc. For me,
it'd seem like a lot of time and work I don't want to be spending organizing.

------
MLnick
This is very similar to an idea I have had in my head for a while now (I put
it up on the recent startup ideas Google spreadsheet). The main angle that I
thought would be to have it built around a recommendation engine that tries to
actively show you things you may like to do with friends, family, etc. The
main key innovation I had in mind was trying to use images to come up with
recommendations, ie if you post pics of mountain biking it looks for upcoming
races etc. If you like the suggestion you can share it with your friends and
create an event for a group.

I reckon if done in the right way (ie good privacy approach and user control
over it), you should be able to make money through links to the events
(although I think the revene model would need to have the right incentives ie
aligned to suggesting the best stuff).

And the image stuff is hard - but would be pretty great if done right!

------
jacquesm
> I want to rank my friends, be part of different social circles, because
> that's how I operate.

That's actually a really good point, you've hit the nail on the head with that
one.

~~~
vaporstun
Going one step further, it would be very nice to be able to supply information
to different users based on their group. This is another thing which is
lacking in Facebook. In fact it is something which is currently lacking from
every social network (that I'm aware of at least). Everyone scrambling to
build the next Facebook in the wake of the recent debacle may want to take
some of these ideas.

For example, in your "About Me" section, with your co-workers you may want to
say that you enjoy programming and playing around with server configuration
whereas with your old college pals, you may want to say that you miss the days
of binge drinking and getting laid. You would not want either group to see the
other explanation of who "you" are.

Specifically related to this idea, you may want to have enable your college
pals to see that you are attending "Remembering the good ole days kegger
reunion party" while you may want your co-workers to see that you are
attending a conference on some technology. You probably do not want them both
to see the events that the other sees.

On a basic level, I like how Google Voice handles this. You can specify a
certain voicemail message to be heard by people who are not in your phone
book, and different voicemail messages for any groups you have created. This
allows me to have a silly message played only for my friends and not worry
that an important call will come in from an unknown number and get my silly
message. This concept expanded to any and all properties of a social network
seems crucial as far as I am concerned.

~~~
jacquesm
I think the dutch 'hyves' has something like that.

------
naktinis
This is exactly what we are doing in toostis.com. We try to create a one-in-
one tool for sharing this kind of information with your interest circles (that
we call "tribes"). Currently when you log in and start attending events the
recommendation algorithm learns about different social groups you belong to.

One needs to consider three approaches of forming an interest circle: shared
(an explicit list of members), individual (each user maintains several lists
of his friends) and automatic (extracting subgraphs of user relation according
to attendance).

What we are currently willing to provide is the combination of them all.
Automatic extraction is fun to play with, but you always want more control
over it. We are also preparing to launch something similar to the shared
model, where you could subscribe to an organizer which is basically a group of
related events.

~~~
martis54
Sounds great:) i'll try it!

------
Serene
I am able to do this with Linkedin - my connections are tagged into priority
groups. Selected Meetup, Yelp, Facebook and e-mailed events go to my public
calendar: <http://sites.google.com/site/aurametrix/events> (It can be easily
done with Google Calendar API) Of course, this could just mean that I am not
in your target market.

------
percept
Is it a product or a feature? I don't know, but that may illustrate the heart
of the problem, and the difference between Kiko and Facebook.

I think startups have been trying to do this since Web 1.0.

Maybe a freemium model? Target businesses? [Though they use Outlook.]

BTW don't let your friends see that ranking! ;)

~~~
kyro
I think it could stand alone as a product. As far as people trying this from
Web 1.0 days - I'd say that was just a timing issue.

------
rglullis
<http://thesponty.com>

------
hajrice
Is this demanded enough that you'd actually pay for it? Don't wanna sound like
a jerk or anything, just wanna see how _big_ the demand is.

~~~
bemmu
The CPMs on event related things might be high enough to just rely on ads.

<http://mixergy.com/evite-harry-lin/> "effective CPM, when I left the company,
we got, we’d driven it up, the effective CPM was just under ten dollars. And
on certain pages, certain classes of pages, we enjoyed a one hundred dollar
CPM, on all those ads"

~~~
zck
I can imagine that, for example, TGI Friday's would pay a decent amount for an
ad on a meeting request to eat out at Chili's or Ruby Tuesday's.

~~~
hajrice
Keep in mind that it's really hard to approach these types of companies. And
when you do approach them, you'll have to have a large audience.

------
mkramlich
Meetup.com has some of this though may not allow totally secret/private
groups/events.

------
codemechanic
Checkout the Tonido workspace application <http://www.tonido.com>.

You can create multiple social groups and have a calendar for each group as
well.

