Offering what it says is a different spin on location-based services, four-year-old New York startup Hotlist is pursuing more funding and plans to expand its staff to fill its new offices. Billed as a social discovery engine, Hotlist lets users see where their friends and acquaintances plan to be, rather than where they have already checked in.
“When you think about Foursquare, it’s more about declaring where you are for the sake of an incentive to get a deal,” Hotlist CEO and co-founder Chris Mirabile says. “There is no emphasis on the social aspect.”
Coordinating plans for a night out even among close-knit friends, Mirabile says, can be tedious. Text messages and photos from the venue are often shared too late for their fellow revelers to join in the fun. “The problem was being able to stay in touch with everybody and figure out what they were doing without having to text, call, or e-mail everybody every day,” he says.
From that personal frustration emerged Hotlist, which aggregates information from Facebook users who RSVP to public events. Mirabile says Hotlist collects that public information from more than 110 million people’s social plans. Hotlist only shows first names and profile photos of the expected attendees. While users of Hotlist must sign up through their Facebook accounts, information is gathered from all Facebook users who make their plans public even if
