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Name: The Hotlist
Quick Pitch: The Hotlist is the first geo-social aggregator that shows people what’s happening today, tomorrow and beyond among their personal networks.
Genius Idea: The Hotlist is a Facebook-integrated web app that shows you a visual map of upcoming events in your area and across your social network. It highlights what events your friends are attending and what events have the most buzz.
We like how seamlessly The Hotlist integrates with Facebook. It culls your friends and group data and compares it to all of the publicly listed events happening across the network. You can see what’s going on in your area or add other cities that you want to check out.
We did run into one small bug — The Hotlist had my location listed as New York, even though that’s not what my Facebook profile says. I imagine this happened in part because the app was developed at NYU. Still, it was easy enough to add our city to the list and browse from there.
You can filter listings by groups of friends and event types, which is an easy way to get an overview of what’s going on. By default it lists the events that are either the most popular or that are being attended by your friends.
A nice touch is that once you select an event, you can not only see who is attending from your Friends or Friend of Friends list, but you can read a detailed description of the event and then access Twitter and Yelp reviews about the venue.
It also breaks down attendees by gender, which is cool if you want to avoid a sausage fest (or if you want to seek one out).
Right now the service is only usable if you have a Facebook account — but we actually think building off of the Facebook events calendar is a smart move. I would love it if the iPhone app for the Hotlist (which is in development) could connect to both Foursquare and Facebook — because that would be a killer match for mobile.
How do you find out about what events are happening near you? Let us know!
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Tags: calendar, Events, facebook, foursquare, geolocation, the hotlist
