Plancast

» see plancast.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

plancast came and went during years i was very much online, but it lived on a scene i was not on: the american tech-twitter crowd that liked to broadcast which conference or meetup it was heading to next. that was most of its user base, more or less, and i was not anywhere near it.

mark hendrickson left a writing job at techcrunch in 2009 to build it, and it launched that december. the idea was a social network pointed at the future instead of the past. you posted plans you meant to keep, a show you were going to or a trip you had booked, and your friends could say they were in. it got a warm early-adopter reception and a seed round on the strength of it.

the traffic never grew past that first crowd. in january 2012 hendrickson wrote an honest post-mortem: the early buzz had fooled the team into thinking a real market was waiting, and it was not. plancast was folded into active network, an events-management company, within weeks, and the standalone service wound down. sharing your future turned out to be a harder sell than sharing your past, since plans are private and keep changing, and facebook already sat right next door.

~ the record ~

~ why it stalled ~

the post-mortem is the useful part of this grave. plancast had a clean idea and a small loyal crowd, and it mistook the second for proof of the first. broadcasting your future plans asks more of a person than posting a photo of last night, and most people did not want the exposure or the commitment. the early adopters loved it precisely because they were the sort who enjoyed announcing where they would be. everyone else stayed quiet.

~ what it became ~

active network absorbed the team and the technology into its event business, which is where a plans-based tool made more sense than as a consumer network. plancast the destination stopped mattering. the idea of a calendar you shared forward instead of back kept turning up in other products, none of which credited the small startup that tried it first and then wrote down, plainly, why it had not worked.

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