A social networking tool for coordinating lunch. Everyone in your social network has an opportunity to register the time they want to go to lunch or to simply make themselves available. When you are ready to go, check the system to see who else is ready. You can tag others as people you want to join or that you want to avoid.
Display preferences would allow you to tune who gets to see your planned lunch time vs who gets to see only if you are ready to go vs who doesn't get to see anything.
Sure, you could pick up the phone, or check im or walk around or any number of other things, but those aren't solutions looking for a problem.-- toodles, Oct 07 2010 Doodle.com http://www.doodle.com/Simple website for arranging meetings [Jinbish, Oct 07 2010] Should also have a feature to include where you want to eat, where you're willing to eat, and where you absolutely won't eat. Both permanent settings for things like Vegetarian menu required, and day to day for "I had Pizza the last three days".-- MechE, Oct 07 2010 the less people around on my lunchtime walks photographing the wildlife the better. so this is good so I can avoid people...-- po, Oct 07 2010 MechE I'd put those in a later upgrade, but great features.
Ian I don't use those tools, so I'm just going based on my assumption that those are primarily location based tools...which is a useful aspect. Here location could be used as a filter for finding available lunch partners. My main objective is to make coordinating lunch as easy as possible.-- toodles, Oct 07 2010 I read this as "Lurch Coordination Tool." I only put it out here because someone could probably come up with a good HB idea (happy accidents, etc) from it. Not me.
Anyway, I think the real Tool is a great idea. One bun [+].-- Boomershine, Oct 07 2010 Doodle looks like it is close, but even so...I guess I'd consider a good feature of the LCT to be its asynchronous nature. The only planning you do is to choose your favorite people, then put your planned lunch time...which may default to a certain time each day or whatever. When you have a meeting, push the lunch time right or left...or have it integrate with your calendar. When you're ready to stand up from your desk to go to lunch, check the tool and go. Maybe you could choose to send a notification to others so that they can just stand up or respond with a '5 minutes' or whatever.
I suppose that as you reach someone's time-to leave, their name would start turning from no highlighting gradually to green at the time. Then starting 5-10 minutes after their lunch time, it'll start changing yellow to red as an indication of likelihood of being available. Of course, a button would be provided for those who want to immediately be shown as gone.
I guess the intent is that it's not a meeting, and there's no obligation between any of the participants.-- toodles, Oct 07 2010 random, halfbakery