SocialCalendar Organizes Your Social Life

Facebook application SocialCalendar is steadily gaining popularity as a go-to calendar for users to manage their social lives on the network. With over 11 million total installs and about 2 million monthly active users, SocialCalendar is one of the only widely used, general purpose calendars on Facebook.

SocialCalendar lets you plan events among Facebook friends, get movie showtimes and integrate events into a public calendar. Users can also import and get email reminders about events, birthdays and anniversaries. The app also lets you use virtual good icons to mark events and allows you to give virtual goods, like a birthday cake, to friends for special occasions. The price of virtual goods on the site ranges from $0.50 to $1.00 (some are free as well). The calendar app also allows users to make gift wish lists through Amazon and distribute the lists to friends and family.

SocialCalendar is making some other interesting moves to monetize the app as well. First, the app has integrated, contextual advertisements from TV and movie studios and gifts and flower companies. Currently, SocialCalendar has a partnership with NBC to advertise the new late night comedy show, “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” and integrate the show’s times into users’ calendars. SocialCalendar has a movie calendar, which allows users to see weekly movie openings and movies that have made the top box office list. Users can add movies to their SocialCalendars, and can see show times and buy tickets to local shows in their areas directly.

SocialCalendar has also partnered 1-800 Flowers.com to offer users the ability to easily send flowers for a friend’s birthday or special event. And SocialCalendar sells virtual goods, which the founder, Raj Lalwani, says are becoming increasingly popular with users.

Rival Facebook calendar app, FriendEvent Calendar, has an easier to see layout and clearly differentiates between events that are private or public, but doesn’t seem to have the viral following that SocialCalendar has on Facebook. SocialCalendar has some useful features to organize and mark events but I found myself wishing that it wasn’t simply a Facebook application. It seems like it would be pretty useful as a stand-alone application. SocialCalendar is also a Bebo app but doesn’t seem to have nearly as large as a following with only 31,000 users. Lalwani says that since the Bebo app isn’t keeping up with the pace of the Facebook app, the company is considering shutting it down.