Socializr gets into aggregation with 'Event Connect'

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."