Lunchwalla: Getting Together for Lunch Just Got Easier
Making breakfast, lunch or dinner plans for any group that involves more than two people can quickly become a chore. Lunchwalla, which launched earlier today, wants to make this task a bit easier by providing you with a web service that allows you to avoid long email chains and back-and-forth phone calls. You simply pick a time, choose a few restaurant options and a list of friends you want to invite. Lunchwalla will email your contacts and they can then RSVP and vote for the restaurant they prefer.
What makes Lunchwalla unique is that it brings together Yelp reviews, OpenTable reservations, menus and local coupons. This makes it different from similar scheduling services like Evite, Tungle.me, Presdo or Doodle.
Not Just for Lunch
While the name implies that Lunchwalla is only focused on getting people together for lunch, the site won't stop you from organizing breakfast, brunch, dinner or happy hour get-togethers.
After you have sent out your invitations, you contacts can vote for different restaurants right in their email clients. Once everybody has voted (or decided not to attend), you can make the final decision and your contacts will get one more email with the finalized details. After the event is over, you can also upload photos from the meal and share them with your friends.
One nice aspect of the site is that it allows you to pick a set of favorite restaurants, so if you decide to use the service regularly, you won't have to pick and choose the same restaurants again. You can also group your contacts into lists.
Privacy
One aspect of the site that not everybody will appreciate, however, is that - by default - all your invitations, comments and events are public and will appear on your profile page. If you want to keep your lunch plans private, make sure that you change the privacy settings for your profile. Even then, though, the event page remains visible to anybody who has access to the URL.
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Thank you very much really very well ;)
Bullcr*p. A social network to find people for lunch? Gee, have you heard of facebook? Maybe?
I tried to use this in Firefox but it didn't render correctly. Are you all showing the same issue?
Hello Frederic,
We are working on adding a few features to help address some security concerns. It is a hard balance to strike between social openness and privacy. Currently, we have 3 settings: Public, Private, and Friends Only. One feature that should be available in the next day or two is the ability to mark any event as private during the event creation process as well as after the fact. As you mention, all events can be viewed using the direct URL. However, we utilize an encrypted digest string along with the event id in the database to prevent people from just typing in URLs to try and pull up events. So, as a result, the only way you can see the event details is if you received an email containing the URL, or as a link within the website which are governed by the security settings discussed previously.
Also, in response to the very common question of why Lunchwalla.com and not someplace like Facebook, or Yelp, or MySpace? The answer to that is quite simple. Lunchwalla.com is focused on planning social events. We take certain aspects of those sites and combine them into a useful tool to plan social events. One of the key differentiators between Lunchwalla.com and other sites is the "Social Election". We allow our users to plan events with the option to list multiple locations and allow the invitees to vote on where they would like to go.
We appreciate the feedback.
Sumit Birla
Chief Walla @ Lunchwalla
One feature that should be available in the next day or two is the ability to mark any event as private during the event creation process as well as after the fact. As you mention, all events can be viewed using the direct URL. However, we utilize an encrypted digest string along with the event id in the database to prevent people from just typing in URLs to try and pull up events