Say you want to organize a small gathering at a local pub for this Thursday's NCAA men's basketball tourney. You could send an e-mail to your friends, then wait for the responses to flow back in. Or, you could take an extra step and create an Evite, a Facebook event or another similar online invitation. But, if the email seems a little too unwieldy and the Evite or Facebook scenario a bit too formal, there's another alternative.

PencilYouIn, a new service created by the young Seattle Web developers behind the ride-sharing service Ride Penguin, today is rolling out a new idea that's designed to fill the gap between e-mail and Evites. The site still has a few kinks to work out, but co-founder Ben Eidelson said that the idea is to add a "social layer" to your online calendar.

"Digital calendaring really hasn't evolved very much, since maybe the late 90s," he says.

"Most people use email or phone calls or text messages to schedule things, and then put them in their own individual calendars," said Eidelson, who is on leave from Microsoft. "And that kind of works on a basic level, but we thought there would be a huge benefit to giving the general consumer a social calendar where all of their event entities can be shared with the people they are scheduling these things with."

The site allows all parties to alter and change the PencilYouIn page. For example, for the interview for this story, Eidelson suggested a 2 p.m. phone call, and I altered that to 3:30 p.m through the app. If we were meeting at a specific location, the page would show a map of that business and offer information through Yelp.

Google and other online sites already allow individual to share calendars, but Eidelson said for the most part those services work pretty much as a wall calendar replacement.

Email has proven to be a pretty useful tool when it comes to organizing a coffee or lunch meeting. But Eidelson think things could simply be more efficient, noting that the communications among email senders and recipients "seems a little broken" in terms of scheduling events.

PencilYouIn integrates with a number of calendar applications, including Google Calendar, iCal and Outlook. And as part of the service, it can be set up to sync up with those calendar applications so events are added to your calendar and the calendar of your friends.

A number of those applications already have calendar and scheduling functions, but Eidelson thinks they've come up with a better concept.

Of course, getting users to move away from established habits in calendar applications is not an easy task. At this point, Eidelson said they are just looking to attract a few hundred users to test out the service.

"We worked really hard to try to make the service the type of thing that people would want to use every day," said Eidelson, adding that he's hopeful that it will spread amongst various friend groups.

Eidelson, along with co-founder Jason Prado, have been working on the PencilYouIn service for the past couple of months. They haven't quite nailed down the business model, though there's opportunity to incorporate local advertising around daily events or premium services. (A coffee shop advertising free wifi to users who need to meetup to worth together on a presentation, for example).

The Web service is part of Eidelson and Prado's startup called Everything is the Best.