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.
