Know Where To Be With Hotlist
by Lenny Liang
November 10, 2011
"What should we do tonight?" It's an oft asked question. Hotlist for Facebook aims to provide the answer.
Hotlist touts itself as the easiest way to organize your social life. Through its integration with Facebook, Hotlist allows you to coordinate social plans with friends and get updated information about the places you may visit, such as pictures of the venue and expected guy-to-girl ratio.
How does Hotlist differentiate itself from other location-based social sites, such as Foursquare? As explained on Hotlist's web site:
Hotlist is not a Check-In service. Hotlist is all about planning, coordinating, and staying in the social loop with the People, Places and Interests you care about. Hotlist isn’t about what you’re doing; it’s about what you’re going to do.I found the app to be temperamental. It crashed multiple times, even when deleted, re-downloaded, and tried on multiple devices. This is a somewhat minor issue, since it should soon be fixed by update. What concerned me more was the screen I received when I clicked on the "friends" option. Underneath the tag "What Your Friends Are Up To" was a large gray blank. At first, I thought this might be an error. Where were the smiling faces of my friends? Then I realized that none of my friends use this service. Sarah Kessler may have said it best in her article published on Mashable:
But convincing people to use an additional service is always a hard sell, and text messages, emails and phone calls — inefficient as they may sometimes be — have a pretty strong hold on our habits. The startup has made a smart move by integrating Facebook in a way that makes it valuable before all of your friends use it, but is that enough? Martire is hoping that ease of use will trump habit.The key to Hotlist's success, as with other social networking services, will be determined by the people that use it. Hotlist may eventually revolutionize the way people plan their events, but until more of my friends use it, I'll stick with email, texting, and the traditional phone call. Hotlist for Facebook is available in the App Store now - free of charge.