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Plancast!: The future of checking in?Posted in Social Networking on 10 Mar 2010 |
 Written by Allison Wahl |
  (5 votes, average: 3.20 out of 5)  Loading ... |
Checking in drives a lot of social interaction, but there is one major problem. Say you find out your friend has just checked in at a restaurant. You go over to meet him, but once you arrive, he’s no longer there. He’s gone off and checked in somewhere else. Thus starts an epic chase all over town to catch up to your friends’ updates. Since check-ins only reflect present activities and not future intentions, these instances are all too possible, creating the need for a way to track where your friends plan to be and for how long.
Plancast! addresses this issue and enables you to tell your friends in advance where and when you plan to do things. Create plans that you can share with your subscribers, subscribe to others’ plans, and discover all the great things that are going on. Plus, you can opt to “count me in” or “count me out” of an event, so that you can keep tabs on who will or will not be in attendance.
However, there is one drawback. Plancast! only enables you to subscribe to other Plancast! users. While you can connect over Facebook and Twitter and find friends or share events that way, the actual perks of Plancast! are limited to those within the app. I think it would make the app even more essential if it could be integrated into the likes of Foursquare and other LBS apps, or simply enable connectivity to those platforms.
Plancast! certainly makes planning meet-ups and hot activities an easier and less exhausting process, but still needs some plans of its own before it can play ball with the big guys.
