Caltweet: Manage Events Through Your Social Network

If you looked at the name Caltweet and figured it was a twitter app for Californians, it’s a good guess, but it’s actually something much more practical.  Caltweet takes the functionality of a “cal”endar and combines it with the ubiquity and interactivity of Twitter allowing for features such as invites, guest lists, promotions, and so on.

The app was developed by two young entrepreneurs Frederickus Williford, CEO, and Michael Revell, VP Business Development, who initially started it as a tool to simply manage events, but is now a used to do much more.  Currently, the app services both Twitter and Facebook allowing the promotion of events on each.

One of the “Twitteresque” caveats is that event creators can only invite those who are followers, not solely those that they follow, which adds a bit of a twist when it comes to promoting events.  Future plans include “Caltweet Business” which seems that it may incorporate more of a custom service for premium users, allowing for more effective marketing and promotional efforts.

In regards to competition, there are a few contenders out there at the moment. Caltweet’s closest competitor would be Plancast. Plancast.com allows you to set up events that you will be attending and broadcast them to your Twitter followers.  One visible user-experience difference is that on the profile pages, Plancast is a bit cleaner, whereas Caltweet has a bit more clutter mostly due to the advertising.

Like every new site or technology, your user base defines the speed of market penetration, and in this case, we see two different approaches.  Plancast was heavily penetrated by attendees of SXSW who are for the most part early adopters, hence for them this type of event management tool would serve to be both interesting, and useful.  Caltweet, however, seems to have more events catered to more of a hip-hop crowd with many promoters finding the site useful for advertising club events.

While the functionality doesn’t differ much, the personality could be the deciding factor on who will use these to applications. Since Caltweet was created by an African American, it could possibly be pigeon-holed as a black product.  So in regards to Caltweet’s success in expanding its market, this could be a question of function vs. perception.

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is a tech enthusiast, strategist, and lover of media.
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