A couple of friends are working on something truly magnificent: spontacts, short for spontaneous contacts. Since their website http://spontacts.com/ is not yet available in English I’ll quickly outline below what Spontacts is about.
Spontacts is based on a simple idea: people want to do exciting activities in their free time. They want to play tennis, go for a hike, play card games, make music together, go dancing etc. However, only a small fraction of our leisure ideas are put into practice. Why is this?
Despite social networks, mobile phones, email etc, it is
- Hard to find people who have time: A tennis double among friends, for example, needs to be planned weeks in advance – as it is hard to find a suitable date in a spontaneous way.
- Hard to find suitable new leisure partners: there are numerous people who share the same leisure interest, e.g. windsurfing. But where to find them? Even more difficult: How to meet with them for an activity?
- Hard to find the right activities on offer: there are lots of leisure activities happening in a city. Still, it is not easy to know if anyone goes jogging or plans a poker evening in my neighborhood. Similarly, there are hundreds of concerts, courses, etc. every day. They are published in event calendars which can’t be filtered according to personal interests. So which one to choose, and where to make new friends?
My friends hinted that Santa might bring us a new Spontats version with much better social network integration. One more reason to be looking forward to Santa coming to town!
Have fun!
P.S. You may also find Spontacts on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/Spontact