Starting with the simple question “What are you doing next?“, the newly launched Fyesta.com, developed by Germany’s Blue Oceans Labs, lets users share their upcoming travel and event plans with select friends or to make them even more public so that they can be discovered further afield.
The service hopes to tap into a sentiment its founders are calling the ”intention web“, which is based on future-looking and predictive data. Now clearly, in terms of events, Facebook also covers this space, as does sites like Plancast, which is probably its closest competitor.
In response, Fyesta says that Facebook doesn’t really offer a way to search for events, local or otherwise, something that they do provide, and concentrates on friends-only whereas Fyesta hopes to also become a broader event discovery tool. Meanwhile, Plancast only focuses on events not travel plans, although it’s a subtle distinction and, admittedly, Fyesta is very much coming out of the traps second, having had to bootstrap around the “day job” at Blue Oceans Labs.
Aside from the basic sharing of intention around events (“public events such as concerts or parties through to private birthday celebrations”) and travel plans, either with friends-only or fully publicly, it’s possible to easily track what your friends plan to be up to or to find events by location and within a specific radius.
Currently, Fyesta is browser-based but it would make a lot of sense to roll out mobile versions as soon as possible. Intent can change quickly – there is an emphasis on realtime here after all – and location and mobile go hand in hand.
Blue Ocean Labs’ other products include a German TV guide for blockbuster movies and a URL-Shortener to combine several links into one, as well as Readport, a service that helps you discover relevant “long-tail” content.