ILCU - The Israeli Lovechild of MySpace and Eventful

Israel-based ILCU, which is currently in beta (although it's been kicking around for a while), is an "event-sharing network" - a site that helps you find things to do in your area. The focus is currently on a select number of "active metros", including 8 major US cities, 2 locations in the UK and a number of European capitals. Obviously Israel is also well-represented.

Like all good social networks, users have profile pages and networks of friends - but they can also tag themselves and post new events to the site. As a result, there are endless ways to find events - by location, by date, through your friends, by tags or by category. Events have their own pages, but so do venues - you could, for instance, find all the events that are coming up in Central Park. You can respond to every event with a "Yes", "No" or "Maybe", and ILCU will recommend new content based on those choices. There's RSS, too, and a neat little display that tracks how many of your friends are online.

It's clear that a lot of thought has gone into ILCU - it's intuitive, fun to use and effortlessly simple. However, I'm not so sure how it will perform in the market - there are plenty of similar services, many of them with much bigger event databases. The obvious advice would be to plugin to the big networks (eg. MySpace, hi5) and get some trickle-down traffic, but in this case they should also think about pre-populating their events database to increase the utility. So while I think the site is a lot of fun, I'm not so sure about its long term prospects.

    ILCU User?

    Mashable's ILCU account is here. If you're a member, feel free to add Mashable to your friends list.

[via PB]