Humans, like the bonobos monkey or the blesmol, are social animals and, as such, they enjoy occasionally gathering for festive activities, such as sexually variant group mating, tunnel debris removal, and Matmos concerts. Now these three species of fauna can plan their nights out with something called Flavorpill GEL, a DIY event-planning service that allows you to create “playlists” of cool stuff to do in your town.
Flavorpill has long been a website dedicated to cool events that are happening in and around various urban areas, including New York, Las Vegas, and San Francisco. GEL adds a bit of user-created content to the mix by allowing friends to make recommendations based on common interests.
“Flavorpill has always been about editors creating weekly shortlists of events, and that has worked really well, but we know that the ultimate recommender is always friends. And as diverse and interesting as we can be, we can never hope to match the true diversity and range of interests found in any great city, so we’ve turned over the task of curator to our community, putting ourselves out of a job as we become the curator of curators,” said Mark Mangan, co-founder of Flavorpill.
The service works a bit like Plancast in that you can easily create events on the fly or join (and share) events that interest you. You can “rally” your friends to attend via Facebook integration and add yourself to the RSVP list with one click. It also adds events to your Google calendar.
GEL was sort of a skunkworks project for Flavorpill. “We built it in-house with a team of four wunderkinds plus myself. We started from scratch, and to make sure we had full focus on an entirely new thing, we worked out of my apartment in Brooklyn for the first month instead of our Soho office,” said Mangan.
Mangan has used the service to discover that Macaulay Culkin is hosting a dance party with his iPod, that the VP debates will be shown at the Housing Works bookstore, and that Warhol is at the Met.
“Online experiences have become really compelling over the past decade, but people have begun to realize how sucked into the virtual life we’ve become – and that human interaction is a good thing. Now we’re using computers to help us have more real-world experiences,” said Mangan.
Flavorpill has set aside 500 invites to you and your buds. You can claim one here or, if you’re a blesmol, there are plenty of roots in your burrow to clear out. Get cracking either way.