No, Plancast has not hired Owen Van Natta as its VP of Business Development (although there is a plan for his welcoming party). Nevertheless, Plancast is a hot startup – as well it should be, because essentially the idea is what we consider to be half of a location-centric social network.

If you are not familiar with Plancast, it’s really a simple idea that is executed extremely well. A user creates a “plan” which is just “what, when and where” and then anyone (assuming it’s a public plan, which almost all are) can just click a “count me in” button and then join that event. The best part about Plancast is its seamless integration with Facebook and Twitter, not only that it allows you to sign-in/sign-up with these services, but that it broadcasts (hence the ‘cast’ in the name) your plan out with a #plan hastag and a link to the plan. Lots of people have been comparing it to event services such as EventBrite or Twtvite (the later of which is another dead simple but extremely well done app), but we see it differently – we see Plancast as a location app, one that, if combined with a check-in type service such as Brightkite, could form the first true location-based social network. Here’s how.

First of all, Plancast right now is only a browser-based web app – they have not launched any mobile apps to our knowledge. While not crippling, this is certainly something that needs to be rectified if Plancast is to grow into what we think they will be. What Plancast does right now is to allow users to make and broadcast events any time in the future, allowing people to join and post comments regarding the event. Add ticketing and more robust event pages (adding photos and video seems pretty logical in addition to text comments) and then Plancast becomes a full-fledged event site. But it can go further. The part that is missing is what happens when the event comes to pass? Right now, there is no way on Plancast to know if someone is actually attending the event, i.e. have they checked in yet?

Plancast could certainly try to build this half of the service from scratch, but we suspect that more likely, their plan (sorry, couldn’t resist) is to integrate one or multiple location app APIs instead. While Foursquare may be the sexier choice of the moment, we wonder if Brightkite might not make more sense for Plancast. Brightkite and Plancast are closer in design, use and simplicity – neither has a gaming element, and both are pretty open in allowing their users to do basically whatever they want. Also, Brightkite has really strived to build their own half of a social network (and actually merged with one a while back) and we wonder if perhaps they aren’t the better fit for the other side of the equation. We’ll just have to wait and see.

(Fun fact: In a role reversal, I am now blogging, and Plancast’s CEO Mark Hendrickson is now the entrepreneur – he was the first blogger (while at TechCrunch) to cover the launch of a website – ZoomProspector – that I helped launch at my last job.)