WayOfPearls – Twitter-like Version of Upcoming for Social Planning

Have you ever felt more than a little disappointed when Twitter updates told you that some of your friends were at a very interesting event (a concert, a presentation, a conference maybe) you had no interest in but would have gladly attended should you know your friends were there? I have had this feeling myself more than once when I wanted to be at a place where some of my friends if I had no idea beforehand they would be there. Unfortunately, Twitter is only intended for you to answer the question what you are doing at any given moment - not what you will be doing in a few hours or in a week. And even if you can know your friends’ plans if you follow all their updates, you won’t have any centralized interface to track all the events your friends are attending in the near future.

Here is where WayOfPearls launched yesterday comes into play: this is a microblogging-style tool for social planning so that you knew what exactly your friends were planning to do that you could be interested in yourself. What it offers is basically very similar to Upcoming - but in a more user-friendly twitter-like style.

WayOfPearls is a product launched to complement an existing lifestreaming service SocialOyster that we reviewed here when it launched a couple of months ago. At the time I was pretty excited about what I saw on SocialOyster as the functionality was rather impressive for a new product and some aspects were even more interesting than what we get on FriendFeed - like how you can track all your friends from other social networks on SocialOyster even if they don’t have the accounts here at all. While on FriendFeed you will have to create virtual friends for that, SocialOyster allows you to do it in a more intuitive way where you actually decide what you see for yourself in a few easy steps.

The latest addition to the lifestreaming aggregator is WayOfPearls planning service that shows you the plans of your friends in addition to their current activities. That basically means that here you can answer a few simple questions to share plans with the world (or some of your friends only - depending on what you choose for each event): where? why? when? As a result an event will be delivered to the people you want it to be delivered to showing where you are going (integration with Google Maps puts this place on a map) and when along with some comments you choose to add.

After an event is created, other users can join it to discuss the details like what they could bring to a party or if someone needed a lift maybe (or if they should take a ball when the event planned is a volleyball game on a beach maybe). Besides, the event owner can also invite others by email so that even people who are not users of the service could still see the plans and join in the discussion.

The most interesting feature is that WayOfPearls allows you to track the future events in your neighborhood so that you could always know when you could meet some of your friends in a bar to share a bear or if you could join your friends for a cycle ride in the nearby park. So if the service gains enough traction, users will always be able to find a few options for some quality time out easily.

It is obvious that we could make the most use of such a service if it was directly integrated into Twitter so that we could easily share and discuss plans with friends that we already have on Twitter instead of making them join yet another service for that. This social planning aspect could be a good fit into our beloved microblogging service and while I know that Twitter team is rarely willing to add new features, maybe WayOfPearls could use Twitter API to let us share the events with our Twitter followers directly. Such integration could really be the key for success for the service to gain traction and add some further value to the way we use microblogging and lifestreaming services now.