More Ups and Downs in Hyperlocal: FatDoor Goes Back to the Drawing Board

Hyperlocal community site FatDoor has shut down and reopened as Center’d, an event planning and neighborhood search site with the tag line “people, places, plans.” This follows last week’s fall of Grayboxx, rise of Angie’s List, and birth of OurTown.

Like FatDoor, the company is in stealth mode with not much more than a landing page offer to join a private beta. After attempting to join, I received an email saying that that my request was being reviewed. But past the front door, more details emerge (per Erick Schonfeld’s sleuthing at TechCrunch):

At Center’d, we’ve been thinking about how to solve the challenges that exist in making plans. From the smallest get together, where you just can’t decide on where to eat . . . to the large fundraisers and school activities that require signups and hundreds of emails and weeks of meticulous planning

Hear us out. We can give you the tools you need to easily organize people, places, and times. Using the latest space-age technology, we have concocted features such as:

Polling tools: Enable your guests to take some of the burden of coming to consensus on the place and time to meet.

Task Management and Volunteer Sign-up : Now you can easily get the team you need to do the stuff you need.

Connection management and calendar sharing : Now that you are suddenly so organized, and ready to pull off the perfect girls’ night out/summer camp/grandparents day/birthday party/first date/last date, let’s make sure those who are important to you can view your calendars. But not everyone, and not every event. We can keep a secret.

Explore neighborhoods : We’ll even help you out with finding other places and events. How would you like a view of your world filtered by the recommendations of people you trust? How would you like to be at the center, and have the people, places, and plans you care about revolve around you, just waiting to be experienced? We like that idea. In fact, we like it so much, we built it.

This sounds like a mix between evite, Yelp and Google Maps. It also comes with some of the social recommendation aspects of Loladex, but without piggybacking on an existing social graph. There are some attractive features, but launching a destination strategy in local is a tough proposition, as the company likely learned with FatDoor.

But there are also some mashup possibilities that come to mind with local sites that already have a lot of content and traffic, such as Yelp. We’ll talk to the company soon, test out the product more comprehensively and give it the chance it deserves. Stay tuned.

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Screen shot courtesy of TechCrunch.