US Edition 
LockItDown app review
Organising meetings, drinks or parties could get a whole lot easier if LockItDown takes off, says Matt Warman.
In an age of Facebook, Twitter and constant communication, it seems we actually see our friends and family less and less. A recent survey suggested that more than 70 per cent of students never even call home, according to their parents. So it’s no wonder that Google, Microsoft and a host of others have put serious investment into technology that allows users to schedule meetings by working out when all parties are free and where they might meet.
It’s likely to be a while yet, though, before a social drink is programmed into every user’s Outlook or Gmail Calendar. Certainly, anything that’s part of Microsoft’s Office ‘productivity suite’ that includes Excel and PowerPoint seems unlikely to catch on with the Facebook generation.
For something rather more likely, step forward LockItDown. This brand new app boldly claims it “allows you to arrange meetings, gatherings and events with your friends, family and colleagues more easily than ever before”.
In essence, rather than trying to share your entire online diary, the app creates a social calendar – install it and then click create an event and you can search for venue, cleverly including maps data via GPS, connect with your contacts and find a suitable time.
The difficulty, of course, is that most of your friends are currently unlikely to be on LockItDown, so they’ll get an automatic text message inviting them to join. Like Facebook events, once you’ve used the software to organise one event, it’s much easier to use it again in the future.
The obvious criticism is that currently, more people are on Facebook or Gmail or other rival services than are using this new one: but there’s an advantage in a separate, shared calendar – and everything’s got to start somewhere. With LockItDown, neatly designed across both Android and iOS, there’s a useful service that solves a real problem. These are the key characteristics and all successful apps – so don’t be surprised if you’re soon receiving text messages and emails inviting you to sign up.