Social planning continues to be a hot topic for developers, and the latest new service out of San Francisco is taking a different approach to the whole thing. Nudge, a mobile and desktop web app, crowdsources activities from people in the area and surfaces the best ones to the top of the list.
The app is centered around inspirational and motivational activities, like bike rides, hiking trips, sunset watching, etc., as opposed to other social-planning apps that focus on restaurants and bars.
Nudge has a similar format to Reddit, allowing anyone to post an entry with a picture and a few hashtags that can then be upvoted by other members of the community. Users can search by nearby, “out there,” and “Serendipity.”
Nearby includes things that are close to the user (right now it’s only available in San Francisco), while out there focuses on travel-type activities, like climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. Serendipity, on the other hand, returns activities that are accessible to anyone, like meditation, go-karting and laser tag.
Users can save events on a list to visit later, or share them on social networks or through email, not only helping to coordinate events among friends but also to spread the app virally.
Nudge competes with a number of apps, most notably Yelp and Foursquare, but founder Al-Hassan Hleileh believes that those apps focus so much on geo-location and food that there is a huge gap for inspirational-type activities. Obviously, Sosh is also growing in the space with a highly curated experience as opposed to Nudge’s crowd-sourced strategy.
Nudge is currently only available as a web app on both desktop and mobile, with a native app launching in October.