If you’re regularly scheduling meetups with friends or colleagues you don’t see regularly in person, you know the routine: you either decide to go to the same bar, restaurant, or coffee shop every week, or the group relies on the one friend willing to use Yelp ahead of time.
Launching today, Jigglist is a group chat app centered around finding places to go that are appropriate for the group that will attend. The idea is that you start a conversation for each new event, adding the people that might want to go. As you work out the logistics as you normally would through chat, you can embed pages for places that might work as easily as you would send a photo to everyone in iMessage.
These pages pull location data from Google, reviews from Yelp, and proprietary data from Jigglist centered around whether the location is appropriate for the size of the group as well as the context: are you going out for drinks with friends, or a professional meeting for networking? What time are you meeting up?
Once suggestions have been thrown into the chat, everyone participating can vote for their preferred venue. This data is the base upon which Jigglist plans to build out its monetization scheme: restaurants, bars, night clubs, and other venues will eventually be able to sign up for premium accounts where they can see when potential customers chose them over other options and what context they chose them for.
In addition to receiving access to that data, Jigglist’s premium users will also be able to host a forum-like page on Jigglist that lets customers ask questions through the app (“Who’s DJing tonight?”), kind of like Path’s Talk feature.
Jigglist is building out that premium feature set yet — it only really makes sense once there’s a network of active users — though Jigglist CEO Rohey Livne says the four-person team is using that longer term goal to inform the design of its app at launch.
Like many social apps today, Jiggliest builds its network on top of your phone contacts: you register your phone number and the app pulls your circle of friends and associates from your address book. It’s better than having to register with an email address, though you still have to bug your friends to install yet another chat app.