Create a Bucket List of Plans with Philly Startup Sqoot

Jen Consalvo August 8, 2010 Tweet

There are so many dimensions to real-time services and social interaction that the possibilities seem endless, yet most services have kept it simple, attacking only one angle. Foursquare and Gowalla are great for finding people and meeting up (and badges) but not so helpful with planning. Plancast is great for alerting people to plans, but hasn’t added real time activities. And who’s got a social wish list so you can find a group of friends to do something you’ve been wanting to do? Well, actually, Sqoot does. Philly based startup, Sqoot asks you to complete the statement: “I want to….” and as you post what you’d like to do, others can see it and respond. It’s a fun way to get your friends together to do the things you’ve been dreaming about. As the team says – think of it as an “aspirational Foursquare.”

Sqoot maintains your social “wish list” of things to do and encourages your friends to join in. Using the hashtag “sqoot”, they broadcast your posts to your social networks on Twitter and/or Facebook and of course you can make friends and plans on Sqoot itself. You can copy other people’s ideas into your own wishlist and join in friends plans. There are a few quirks – like I didn’t realize everything I did would go straight to Twitter (it didn’t ask me first or even tell me). But obviously as messages get sent to large social networks, the return links will create social loops driving usage. People can Facebook “Like” individual plans, sending them to the Facebook news feed and also use Sqoot’s comments for actually creating plans. What’s fun is actually checking things off your list – so you can see a complete record of things you’ve wanted to do, and those that you’ve actually done. Consider Sqoot a type of social bucket-list or a more immediate type of 43things.com with more social network hooks. It’s easy to see how actual geo-location data, calendar integration and badges could make for a very interesting product in the future.

Sqoot is part of DreamIt Ventures and will be on hand at TECH cocktail Philly on August 12th at the Field House from 6:30 pm – 9:00pm ET. The product was created by Mo Yehia and Avand Amiri (previously at Piggyback.it which was a featured startup at TECH cocktail this past May in Chicago).