It’s Friday night and you are headed out for a night on the town. You have to decide who you will head out with, coordinate with your crew, decide where to go, and who to meet. Wendr, a new web startup that announced the release of its new iPhone application at the beginning of New York’s Social Media Week, gives users a new way to plan their night.
Wendr’s basic goal is to make planning your night easier. The idea is that users now spend too much time coordinating with their friends over existing social media. Wendr seeks to condense all of that planning into one, easily usable interface that everyone can download. That way, people will be able to see each other’s plans and modify accordingly, removing painful individual planning and replacing it with collective coordination.
“Wendr solves an everyday problem very directly,” said Sam Zises, Wendr’s creator and CEO.  “We’re about making your real life more social. Instead of wasting time calling, texting, and messaging all of your friends to see what they’re doing tonight, Wendr allows you to coordinate plans with your friends more efficiently, so you can stop ‘checking-in’ and start hanging out.
There will be ongoing concerns with Wendr as it grows and develops. Will it’s interface actually save users time or will it become just another application they have to log into, along with Facebook, Google +, Twitter, and Foursquare? Can Wendr carve itself an independent niche that makes users view it as a worthwhile addition to their social media pantheon? And can it dodge the privacy concerns that will undoubtedly come with having users check in their advance plans, groups, and locations to an easily accessible iPhone application?
The concerns will remain, but at first glance Wendr has a great shot to succeed. While privacy concerns abound on the Internet, as the recent uproar over Google’s rules changes attests, social media sites have barely skipped a beat. More important still, Wendr is a new application that solves an ongoing problem for people, which gives it a strong competitive advantage moving forward.