Get the online 'funmakers' to show you a good time

Most people are coming around to the idea that they can organise important chunks of their lives online. We trust the web to help us find flights, handbags and furniture, to do our banking and to maintain our social circles.

Fun is different, though - our sense of a good time is original, individual and impossible to generalise, and many would resist contracting it out to the algorithmic wonders of Silicon Valley.
But a clutch of new websites have emerged to help Londoners enjoy their precious free time. Design My Night, Lady Blonde and Doing Something are all trying in different ways to deliver a kind of bespoke social life.

Nick Telson, whose site Design My Night(designmynight.com) suggests nights out on the basis of user-inputted variables (you can ask for Sex & the City cocktails at a DJ bar in Soho, for instance), says his venture can "become your new social best friend". He hopes that his site's "contextual search" method replicates "the 'person' you always turn to when you need to know what to do or where to go", and give him an edge over well-established listings websites such as Time Out.

Its upmarket sister Lady Blonde (ladyblonde.com) does a similar thing for high spenders, and goes even further in its dropdown menus of florid adjectives. For the night's "ambience", users can pick "white tablecloth-esque" or "hedonistic", and it allows the searcher to specify who they are going with, including "bank manager" or "someone flash".

Both sites use a tagging system to pull out the most relevant venues from the long lists available elsewhere - but do they work?

A friend who used Design My Night to plan an evening in east London and says she scours Time Out and View London before every weekend to find places that her friends will enjoy noticed an immediate problem: the lack of ideas. "The website didn't suggest any places I hadn't heard of before," she complained, after asking for a low-budget night with the "trendy crowd" in east London.

If the new "fun-makers" are trying to offer users the experience of having best friends all over London, they have to be friends who know what they are talking about. My friend concluded that - in her area - Design My Night hadn't done its homework, although searches in other parts of town yield plentiful suggestions, each with a rating, a "queue buster" with tips on how to get in, and a useful list of prices.

Doing Something (doingsomething.co.uk), which launched in March and already has 3,000 members, generates ideas for what to do on a date from its community of users. Once signed up, you can post what you want to do - recent ideas include "explore Borough Market" and "catch the last day of the V&A's Postmodernism show" - or join in other people's plans.

Its founder Matt Janes says the emergence of sites such as his results from people having less free time, and therefore wanting it to count. On the site's blog are things that people might genuinely not have thought of - such as dressing up as a cockroach to tour the Science Museum or late opening hours at London Zoo.

So can the internet show you a good time? Janes says it can only be an aid: "it's up to the users in the end - but we can make them better informed and increase their chance of fun, certainly."