We tried solving this problem in 2007 with the "plans" functionality in the first iteration of Localist. It's definitely a tough nut to crack, as a website/app will never beat the convenience/accessibility of email.<p>Here's the biggest issue we ran into, which I'm not sure WhereBerry has solved either:<p>Let's say Julie wants to see Fast Five (ugh), and she wants to know which of her friends would like to attend. At first, she considers using WhereBerry, as it's designed for such things. But wait, Julie's friend Joe doesn't have an iPhone. And I know her other friend Steve doesn't use social networking sites besides Facebook. Julie resolves to just send an email out to everyone, so she knows she'll get a response from everyone she wants to talk to in one step. Plus, she already has everyone's email address.<p>See the problem? Julie is forced to isolate her non-WhereBerry friends, or invite some on WhereBerry, and others via email (huge inconvenience). This isn't solving the problem. It's compounding it. Let's say WhereBerry tries to "solve" this problem by allowing Julie to invite non-members via email. We tried that, too. While it sounds good on paper, nobody wants to send their friends an email saying "Hey I want to go to this movie. Join WhereBerry to tell me your response!" In reality, they'll probably text Julie saying "Sure, I can go! Why didn't you just text me?"<p>It doesn't matter if 95% of your friends are signed up to WhereBerry. You'd need 100% to get people to use it in any consistent form.<p>It's not a tough problem to discover, as many products have attempted to solve it. But, no company has succeeded, specifically because of the scenario posed above. I wish WhereBerry luck, but I think it needs to solve the problem before being a "cool plan-making utility." There are millions of those.
I think this is pretty useful for broadening your social graph, or as normals call it - making new friends. There seems to be a trend towards using technology to facilitate having experiences with people that aren't your closest friends but that you have some kind of connection to or common interest with (see grubwith.us). Maybe it's a new kind of social dating, although it certainly could be used for making/solidifying platonic relationships. This is obviously useful for someone that moves to a new city or just wants to explore new relationships. Also, it allows you to throw an idea out there to see if there's interest before having to figure out all the scheduling details.
This is hugely monetizable, far more valuable than checkins. Imagine being able to advertise coupons to people who have already indicated willingness to go to your competitor.
Its not everyday when something we are building ends up on NYTimes as being built by a competitor and that too funded by YC. Its a double whammy though with a cherry on top - of validation.<p>We still havent been able to figure out how to scale this and answer the questions posed by mvkel. We have not quit our jobs and are building this at our spare time, so that shows we are not committed as Whereberry's founders. But its still cool to know that someone else thinks the "pre-checkin" aspect is pretty interesting. Another startup in the same scene would be Ditto.me. They have a beautiful mobile app as well.<p>Just wanted to wish these guys the best.
Telling me I need to "invite a friend" to gain access is extremely lame at this stage in the game.<p>Maybe after I've seen the product and am ramping up my use, this would be ok, but before I've seen it? Poor form.
Seems like YC will take anything with a few good people and buzzwords this day - ignoring the fact that there are 500 million social networks already... Seems better suited as a fb app or something. Either way I personally have little use for this, it's called a calendar...