The Social

A nice little summer shopping spree for AOL: Under the auspices of new CEO Tim Armstrong, the company has acquired "hyperlocal" news site Patch and hipster-oriented events listing site Going.com.

The acquisition of Patch isn't too much of a surprise. Armstrong founded and invested in Patch while at his former gig as Google sales chief. The start-up offers a model for local news on the Web and plans to have launched in a dozen cities by the end of 2009. Going, meanwhile, has been around since 2006 and offers event and invitation services along with ticketing. It's likely that AOL will use its technology to take the service beyond its party-friendly current target demographic.

"Local remains one of the most disaggregated experiences on the Web today--there's a lot of information out there but simply no way for consumers to find it quickly and easily," Armstrong said in a release. "Going forward, local will be a core area of focus and investment for AOL. The acquisitions of Patch and Going will help us build out our local network further with excellent local services that enable people to stay better informed about what's going on in their neighborhood."

He's not the only new-media executive thinking local: in his keynote address at the Advertising 2.0 conference on Wednesday, IAC/InterActiveCorp CEO Barry Diller called local "one of the few areas that hasn't been colonized" on the Web. IAC owns Citysearch, with which AOL has partnered in syndication deals.

Online-invitation service Socializr is hoping to be the FriendFeed for your social life. The site announced on Wednesday that it now aggregates invitations from MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo's Upcoming, Meetup, Google Calendar, and industry leader Evite (owned by InterActiveCorp) in addition to letting members send their own invitations. The new feature is called "Event Connect."

Socializr, which was hatched by Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams, also has implemented Facebook Connect and MySpaceID so that members of those social networks can invite friends to Socializr events. A third new feature of Event Connect lets members tap into their accounts on any photo-sharing sites to pull in pictures.

You can't yet auto-sync your entire Socializr event listing with a calendar service, but Abrams said Event Connect beta testers have been requesting it and that it will probably get implemented down the road.

"The vision for Socializr was always to do more than to be a better Evite," Abrams explained to CNET News. Aggregating other invitation and event-listing services was "sort of something that people have been asking, 'Why hasn't anyone done this?' for ages."

There are plenty of event-listing services trying to take a bite out of the market share that Evite--and now Facebook's invitation service--has dominated for years. Abrams said that while Socializr is small, it's still well-positioned to grow.

"We're doing OK. We haven't taken over Evite yet, but they've been around for 10 years," he said, adding that the company is still prerevenue. "We have a lot of interesting ideas about ad revenue, but it's still premature for us. We're still only five people, and still in the product development and growth stage."

For a company that's cutting costs these days, the annual holiday party is an easy target. But there have been fewer cancellations in the tech industry than one might think.

True, eliminating an evening of eggnog and sugar cookies won't help an ailing balance sheet that much; in the current financial downturn, it has a lot to do with appearances, too. "It's the economy, definitely, but it's also a lot of public perception," said Celia Chen, a New York-based event planner who runs the blog Notes on a Party.

"People don't want to seem like they're being gratuitous or over-the-top when their colleagues have lost their jobs. It's more of a responsible way to run your company," she said.

On the other hand, there's a delicate balance between appearing prudent in the face of hard times, and keeping employee morale afloat. Many tech companies are in trouble, but for the most part they are not in meltdown mode like financial services companies or in a continued downward spiral like print media companies. Perhaps because of this, event planners say they haven't seen the same cancel-everything attitude when it comes to tech companies that they've seen in other industries.

"In the financial industry, their budgets are significantly lower than last year. In the tech world it really depends on the company," said Nate Valentine, a partner in the San Francisco events firm Vintage415. "You're seeing companies that are new, emerging companies that are doing events that haven't done events in the past, because they have the budget (now)."

Things are very different in traditional media companies, many of which have acquired tech start-ups and recently expanded their digital divisions--they're hurting, badly. Hearst Publications, which shuttered three magazines, canceled its party. So did Viacom, which is rumored to have layoffs coming before the end of the year. But many smaller media companies and tech start-ups have never had a large-scale holiday party, and probably aren't hiring high-end caterers or renting out big nightclubs for open bars.

The appearances factor comes into play here, too: employees of some smaller companies say they haven't even heard yet about whether the holiday party is on the books or not, indicating that a few executives are still vacillating on how appropriate it would be to throw a company party amid layoffs. "I haven't actually heard either way yet (about a cancellation)," said a representative from one San Francisco-based start-up that recently cut several dozen employees.

"I can't see us not having (a party)," said an employee of one New York-based blog company that also went through a fresh round of layoffs. "It'll suck, but we'll have it, I'm sure."

For larger companies, scaling back a holiday party can be particularly appearances-driven because there's a good chance they've already paid for much of it. "If you're a really big company, you're putting a deposit down on a Christmas party probably in September, if not August, because you have to accommodate a large group and it's been allocated in the budget for the year," Chen said.

There are signs of cost-consciousness everywhere: Valentine said that recently a group of several dozen Google employees in the Bay Area had arranged for an open bar at one of Vintage415's venues without actually booking the club. In New York, news outlet The Daily Beast reported that Google was renting less glitzy venues for its Gotham holiday parties. (Representatives from Google were not immediately available to confirm the report.)

"They'll still find a way to celebrate," Valentine commented. "It's just a different way to celebrate."

Viacom, for example, canceled its companywide party as well as parties for big divisions like MTV Networks and Paramount. "All employees across the country are getting two extra vacation days in exchange," company spokesman Jeremy Zweig told CNET News.

One member of Viacom's MTV Networks said that he speculates individual divisions of companies may come up with their own smaller celebration plans. "I'm sure we'll have drinks somewhere, at some point," said the Viacom employee, "even if it's just my team."

But a bigger complication arises when it comes to companies that have traditionally invited clients, media, or analysts to holiday parties. Canceling a party to which non-employees, particularly non-employees with an indirect stake in the company, are invited, could skew perceptions about that company's health. Both Google and Facebook, for example, have already sent out the invitations to their holiday media parties, fairly low-key affairs at company headquarters where handfuls of bloggers and journalists show up to schmooze with executives.

That said, the image issues work in the other direction, too. Chen said that a new-media company might want to think twice before throwing a big holiday party where one of the goals is to get loyal advertisers nice and tipsy. "Advertisers, I think they want to know that the companies they're advertising in are fiscally responsible," she speculated. "I think advertising is taking a hit in its own light, so I think the general feeling is that we have to be respectful of what's happening with so many people being laid off. And people really admire companies that are trying to do the right thing."

In the end, it's a tough executive decision. Unlike, say, the financial services industry, there really is no clear-cut answer in the tech sector to the question of whether a holiday party should stay on, scale back, or get the ax altogether. But event planners agree: it's never a good idea to throw a party just to act like things are all right.

"It's very difficult to celebrate with your senior executives when you have to look your staff in the face and say, 'We just had to let half of you go,'" Chen said.

Trendy men's newsletter Thrillist has already shown its penchant for giving the middle finger to all things recession-related, whether it be chartering party planes or throwing '90s-dot-com bubble-theme parties (granted, both of those stunts preceded the Wall Street meltdown by a few months). But the New York-based start-up may be savvier than its big-pimpin' image would have you think.

The latest move from the company is a monthly compendium called Thrillist Invites, which is a listing of stuff you can do for free, if you sign up and RSVP. The first Thrillist Invites list will be for its New York subscribers--you have to already be subscribed to the Thrillist New York newsletter to be ushered into Invites--but versions for other cities, including San Francisco and Los Angeles, are on the way.

"The concept is that these parties are events that typically, Thrillist readers wouldn't have access to: 100 percent free, open bar, great entertainment," co-founder Ben Lerer told CNET News. The invites will range from restaurant openings and wine tastings to nightclub parties and clothing sample sales.

It's sort of similar to MyOpenBar, a weekly listing of regional establishments that offer free or heavily discounted drinking opportunities, but Lerer said it will have a more exclusive, first-come, first-served focus than the "unlimited Pabst Blue Ribbon" offers that often fill up MyOpenBar's ranks.

Lerer added that launching Thrillist Invites wasn't recession-induced, even though belt-tightening readers may be looking for cheap entertainment, and venues may be looking for people to fill their spaces in a time when they might be booking fewer holiday parties.

"It originally stemmed from the fact that we surveyed our audience earlier this year and asked, 'What do you guys want more of?'" Lerer explained. "Something like 80 (percent) to 90 percent of our audience said they wanted more events coverage."

Earlier this month, Thrillist expanded its Web site to offer more content, putting it further into the niche of "lifestyle publication" rather than "daily newsletter," and Lerer said that with a bigger focus on events, the site may expand further--like into Cobrasnake-ish party photo coverage.

Thrillist will also throw more of its own events, a move that some other food-and-bar culture companies, including the San Francisco-based Yelp, have taken in order to fortify a loyal following and give their users an "insider" status. Plenty of liquor brands advertise on Thrillist already, which Lerer said has made it easy for them to nail down booze sponsors.

And Lerer said Thrillist, which is fully advertising-supported and plans to stay that way, is financially sound. Granted, he didn't start from ground zero: he's the progeny of former AOL executive and Huffington Post co-founder Ken Lerer, and fellow ex-AOLer Bob Pittman's Pilot Group investment firm has taken a big stake in the start-up. Another Pilot Group-backed newsletter brand, DailyCandy, sold to Comcast earlier this year for about $125 million.

"Obviously, we get asked this question 50 times a day," Ben Lerer said when asked about a recession strategy. "We are doing really good...even if things slow down in the advertising community, in the online ad space, and even if we're growing less quickly because of some recession."

Contour Venture Partners is the lead investor in Series A funding for Punchbowl Software, which is behind the event-planning and invitation site MyPunchbowl.

Total cash raised was $2.1 million; the other investors in the round include Intel Capital and eCoast Angels.

Previously, Framingham, Mass.-based Punchbowl Software had raised seed funding from Intel and eCoast.

MyPunchbowl's team said that the fruits of the Series A round will be visible soon, with new features and new hires on the way. But invitation start-ups are in a tough spot; IAC's Evite is as big as most of its smaller competitors combined, and Facebook's "events" application has become popular for casual and large-scale get-togethers.

MyPunchbowl's pitch is that it helps with the entire planning process, not just the invitation, and that there are plenty of people looking for that. "We've seen explosive growth since our first...funding last year," CEO Matt Douglas said in a statement.

Electronic wedding invitations aren't exactly Adam Lowe's cup of tea.

As host of the popular Modern Manners Guy podcast, Lowe attempts to marry--pun completely intended--the culture of traditional etiquette with a digital world that increasingly threatens to subvert its longstanding norms. And he admits up front that he thinks using the likes of Evite and MyPunchbowl for formal occasions is "a terrible idea" for the most part; except when difficult circumstances demand it, as was the case when he received a digital wedding invitation recently. There was an illness in the groom's family, and the date of the wedding had to be pushed up to the point where there was no longer a wide enough time frame to order formal paper invitations. "(They) changed to Evite for expedience's sake," Lowe explained.

"I would've been hard-pressed to come up with an example where (electronic wedding invitations) would be acceptable except when real life intervenes," he added.

But "real life" gets in the way in more ways than we think, and people like Lowe may be in the minority soon. The eco-consciousness movement is encouraging us to cut down on unnecessary paper use, and tough economic conditions compel us to be thrifty. And when technology is able to cut down on hours of guest-list organization, the digital route is an obvious one--especially for a generation of young adults that has always used Google search in lieu of the Yellow Pages.

Online invitation services like the InterActiveCorp-owned Evite, the Events application on Facebook, as well as smaller start-ups like Socializr and MyPunchbowl, are nothing new. They've more or less taken over the RSVP duties for backyard barbecues, Halloween parties, birthdays, and even holiday cocktail soirees. Paper invitations still reign at the upper echelon: weddings and high-end corporate events, as well as other formal occasions like bar mitzvahs, proms, and charity fundraisers. But at this point, there are only a few tenuous standards of etiquette that are keeping this relic of the analog age alive and kicking.

"In the past, I never would have thought to use an electronic invitation, because I don't know if it was as much of a formality as it was about brand awareness and being so protective over how the brand was portrayed," said Celia Chen, a former luxury-brand event planner who now writes the blog Notes on a Party. "Image was so important: the paper stock, the font. We would have invitation designers, and we'd go through multiple edits."

But people are going digital, and Chen said that recipients have grown acclimated to it, especially as the younger generation grows up. "I think it's generational," she said. "People always wanted to speak to the hostess when they made a reservation at a restaurant. Now they just use OpenTable." Indeed, a 25-year-old getting married in 2008 likely had an e-mail address before he or she had a driver's license. Teenagers celebrating bar mitzvahs and Sweet 16s can't remember a time when the Internet wasn't everywhere.

One of the biggest drawbacks to electronic invitations for an event planning veteran like Chen was that they were neither attractive nor customizable enough for upscale or formal events. Facebook invitations cannot be modified beyond the social network's blue-and-white design, and Evite still pretty much relies on clip art. Though Evite still owns the lion's share of the digital invitation market, with stats from Hitwise showing that its traffic far eclipses that of its smaller rivals combined, alternatives like MyPunchbowl, Renkoo, Centerd, and Socializr offer different looks and feels for different kinds of events and hosts.

Chen has since started using Pingg, an invitation start-up geared toward a more discerning crowd. "There was a whole segment of event types that people just did not want to use electronic invitations for," Pingg co-founder Lorien Gabel said of his rationale behind creating the company, which gives the option for hosts to accompany their digital invites with print versions for all or some of the guests. "I'd like to believe that because of how we do things you also get the aesthetic aspect of it, you don't have to sacrifice it."

With the option of sending a pretty, well-designed electronic invitation now out there, they become more of a viable alternative for organizers of higher-end events who happen to be conscious of environmental impact, cost, or efficiency. "Not having to use paper is huge when you're trying to be eco-conscious," Celia Chen said. "It's better for the environment, it's cheaper if not free, and you're collecting the majority of your RSVPs in a place where there's no human error. People either hit 'yes,' 'no,' or 'maybe,' and it'll download into a list."

Manners expert Lowe still isn't convinced, saying that the chance to be economical isn't enough to sway him. "There are always ways to do (paper invitations) in a cost-effective way," he said. "You can get paper, print them yourself, hand-write them." As for being environmentally friendly, "(that) point is actually quite well-taken because it does create quite a lot of paper waste. What might be interesting is to see if there are people or companies that come up with very low-impact ways of generating invitations that are either easily recyclable or directly reusable."

But Lowe acknowledged that for efficiency's sake, as well as to fit the culture of the digital age, sometimes there are reasons to try and bridge the gap. He suggested that for events like weddings and bar mitzvahs, organizers could send out an electronic "save-the-date" in advance that would allow guests to opt out of a paper invitation if they preferred the digital route.

"If you really know your guests and you really know it's a preference for them, I think that's great," Lowe said. "Absolutely times are changing, and what is appropriate changes."

Proponents of digital invitations admit that there are lingering reasons, beyond etiquette, that sometimes compel hosts to stick to paper invitations. Chen said that the occasional client would raise the question that e-mail invites might not make it past a spam filter, and added that others were concerned about how much of a splash an e-mail could possibly make in an age of clogged Outlook inboxes.

"At New York Fashion Week, you've got 12 days of shows and events and it's highly, highly competitive," Chen said. "If you don't send out a paper invitation, (it doesn't work). There's something about it landing on someone's desk and having it be tactile."

But if you look at the ultimate gauge of formal events--weddings--things are certainly changing in favor of the digital. "A large, not quite a quarter yet, but about 20 percent of our events are actually wedding-related," Lorien Gabel said, saying that plenty of bachelor parties and bridal showers show up on Pingg.

As for invitations for wedding ceremonies themselves, Gabel said they're creeping in. "I see a couple of them a day," he observed.

The ill-fated invitation.

(Credit: Facebook)

Mark Zuckerberg, what hath thou wrought? A Facebook invitation for a massive beach party in Britain looked to ensure an event so wild and widespread that the local police felt the need to impose a 24-hour ban on liquor consumption.

When more than 7,000 people RSVP'd to an invitation for a "Night of Mayhem" in the British coastal region of Torbay, set to take place this Friday night, the local press started jumping on the story.

Finally, the local cops started to get concerned. According to the blog PSFK, a 2003 law enabled the police to impose a 24-hour ban on liquor in Torbay, meaning that the party hosts would've had to obtain a permit.

Organizers promptly canceled the event.

People attending beaches in Torbay on the weekend will be asked to leave or be arrested," the original invitation read. "Do not travel to Torbay. There will still be a high police presence around the coast. No event whatsoever will be taking place in Torbay, and we urge you to inform all others you know that are planning to attend that it is no longer going ahead."

Many invitations on Facebook are completely open to the public, resulting in the possibility that an event will get completely out of hand when large numbers of people show up.

This spring, a large amount of press ensued when a British teenager reportedly created Facebook and Bebo invitations to her parents' vacation house in Spain; hundreds of people showed up and subsequently trashed the place.

If Going.com is for sweaty nightclub parties, Meetup is for business mixers, and Yahoo's Upcoming is for geeky hackathons, a new site called Center'd is for your church picnics.

The event organization site is clearly designed for a crowd looking for a simple online planning experience rather than the Web 2.0 maximum, as well as those looking to collaborate with other community members. It evolved out of a project called Fatdoor, shaped by user feedback that (among other things) changed the potentially offensive name.

As with its Fatdoor predecessor, Center'd aggregates local business ratings and reviews from Yelp and MenuPages and lets members tag venues. There are a few new features that the likes of Upcoming haven't come up with yet, and most of them deal with group-organized events. If you're not sure when or where to hold an event, for example, you can provide a handful of options and let your guests vote. You can also put out a call for volunteers and specify exactly what they'd like you to do.

But Center'd, from what I've seen after playing around with the beta version, doesn't offer nearly enough to make it a truly worthwhile entry into the "event site" niche. That said, it's an easy-to-use site with a clean interface and stands a chance of appealing to the luddite niche.

Indeed, the site doesn't even classify its early phase as a "beta," opting instead for the decidedly lower-tech "first draft."

Youth-oriented mobile carrier Helio announced Wednesday that it has launched a bar and restaurant search site through a partnership with Buzzd, which also powers the mobile sites for local events and entertainment services like TimeOut New York, and Flavorpill.

Helio's new service, which is ad-supported, lets people in major U.S. cities search on the mobile Web site--linked from the home page of the carrier's browser--for bars, clubs, and restaurants. Most of the data will be pulled from Buzzd partners like Flavorpill, TimeOut, and the IAC-owned Citysearch. Added on, however, will be "event feeds" with specific pricing and night-specific details as well as short user reviews in real time.

So, theoretically, searching for the downtown New York hotspot Libation on a Saturday night could yield an update from another Buzzd user an hour earlier, saying "Ew, tonight's bouncer's mean and the line takes 30 minutes."

Perhaps more exciting is the fact that Helio is working to pull GPS into the mix. The carrier's current handsets come with the technology already, and a representative told me that the Buzzd service will eventually integrate GPS, so people won't have to say exactly where they are in order to find nearby parties and bars. (Right now they have to provide a location or street intersection.)

The catch is that Helio, which has struggled with growth and profitability, is a small carrier. Generating the critical mass for "real-time" reviews of a particular nightclub on a particular date will be tough, so the service may not turn out to be quite as teeming with up-to-the-minute information as Helio and Buzzd are hoping.

That said, location-based mobile services are revving up, and some will take off as soon as GPS-enabled handsets go into broader use or as soon as people whose devices are equipped with GPS realize that they have it. (I've noticed many people still don't know.)

Competitors in this space include Loopt, which has deals with mobile carriers Sprint and Boost, and Socialight. The latter is currently more like a user-generated version of Gridskipper city maps but has hinted at plans to move into the GPS sector when the technology becomes more widespread.