Showing posts with label EventBrite. Show all posts
Showing posts with label EventBrite. Show all posts

Monday, January 23, 2012

PlanCast Failed For Not Catering To Its Power Users

Image representing Mark Hendrickson as depicte...Image via CrunchBaseMark Hendrickson, CEO, PlanCast: The Uphill Battle Of Social Event Sharing: A Post-Mortem for Plancast

PlanCast is a liked service. And it is still going down. Why?

Robert Scoble's comments to the post are enlightening. Scoble is a power user. PlanCast needed to cater to his needs to take off.

PlanCast needed to engage people who create events, promote events.

PlanCast's Facebook, Twitter, EventBrite, MeetUp Integrations

Robert Scoble's Comment
Image representing Robert Scoble as depicted i...Image via CrunchBaseI'm really sad that you are killing this. Unfortunately there were several other things you did wrong:

1. You didn't have ways to share a calendar of things for my readers that's SEPARATE of those that I'm actually attending.

2. You never improved it and you didn't listen to users.

3. It wasn't integrated with Facebook events. I would hear about things on Facebook and adding them to Plancast was a real pain.

4. Whenever I heard about events almost always I would be mobile. But the mobile version of Plancast sucked.

5. Searching for things or adding them was difficult.

6. You never really got to the business model. That should have set off red flags for me. Yet no one else knew about my travels. I'm in Europe right now, which meant I spent more than $4,000 on travel and you couldn't monetize that at all? Nope. Why? Because you never made deals with AirBNB or Kayak or Hipmunk or other travel sites.

7. I couldn't create calendars for specific kinds of events. For instance, I could never create a calendar of just Barcamps around the world.
It bums me out a service I actually liked using won't be improved and, even, will disappear. So sad.

Saturday, December 10, 2011

PlanCast's Facebook, Twitter, EventBrite, MeetUp Integrations

Image representing Plancast as depicted in Cru...Image via CrunchBaseI have stayed on a lookout for Holiday parties and today I was looking around PlanCast and I just so happened by the Settings page. And I got impressed. This might not be a new thing, but it is new to me. Now my MeetUp RSVPs and EventBrite RSVPs and my Facebook Events automatically show up in my PlanCast timeline. I dig that. PlanCast is now going to be more useful to me.

The page now also lets me automatically follow my Twitter and Facebook friends who might also be on PlanCast, and when I saw that I was a little hesitant because I have lots of Twitter friends. But then I decided to go for it. Because if you are on Twitter, and if you either follow me or are followed by me, and if you are also signed up for PlanCast, that is a lot of filters. That is like saying if you are at a tech event and you come across someone who does not have a Twitter handle that person is probably not worth networking with.

And my connections on PlanCast ballooned by about 700 people right away. And that's okay. Now I might have more events to choose from. And it's nice to show up at some event and know that there are at least five people there you already know or can quickly know ("Hey, I think you follow me on Twitter!"). You are more likely to pounce on the 200 in the room you don't know that way.

Right now I almost feel about PlanCast the way I felt about Twitter when I first heard of the embed tweet option. Although it is fair to say the two are in two very different leagues. Like Dick Costolo once said of Eric Schmidt: "We are not on the same plane, and I mean in the Gulfstream sense."

But then my blog itself is not a bad place to look to find events: December Events.