I recently used Evite to send invitations for a party at my house. Overall, I was pleased with the experience. The selection of invitation styles was huge. The invitee tracking tool was informative. But the site's user interface made it too complicated to send an invitation. Worse, Evite hasn't really embraced the social networking space--there's no Evite app on Facebook nor Twitter integration. And the closest it comes to going mobile is sending SMS invites and offering a mobile site.
So I set out to find some alternatives to Evite to see if they could provide a better service.
Crusher provides a ton of options.
(Credit: Don Reisinger/CNET)CircleUp Though it's not specifically designed to provide invitations and tracking, CircleUp does let you invite others to an event and track their attendance. The page detailing whether or not invitees will be attending the event is especially good. But CircleUp simply isn't as useful as Evite, nor as convenient.
Crusher I like Crusher. It's simple and clean. Creating invitations can take less than a minute. But if you're the type who wants to tweak an invitation to fit your needs, the site also has a CSS editor. You can add video, chat, photos, and much more. It's great for the Web geek and the Web novice alike. And it's better than Evite.
Enclude Unlike Evite, Enclude lets you send e-cards. But its invitation creation tool doesn't provide as many planning options as Evite's. And if you really care about the design of the invite, you'll find fewer cards on Enclude. I also wasn't impressed with its invitee tracking tool. Simply put, it's no Evite.
Facebook Most of the people who I would invite to a party are my friends on Facebook anyway, so creating an event and sending out an invitation through the social network is quite convenient. Creating an invitation in Facebook takes less than a minute. Everyone can see who will be attending the party. Attendance tallies are updated as soon as the invitee responds. If you don't need to invite too many people outside of your Facebook friends list, Facebook is a fine invitation tool. It's much simpler than Evite.
Invitastic Invitastic is ugly, too simple, and unable to compete on any level with Evite. That said, it might come in handy when you want to quickly send out an invite to a couple friends and you don't want all the extras Evite provides. But even in those circumstances, I'm hard-pressed to find a reason to use Invitastic instead of other simple services, like Zoji.
... Read more- AOL relaunches its news service. AOL relaunched its news service with an all-new design earlier this morning. In addition to adding an extra column, it now features some Web 2.0 goodies such as a tag cloud of popular story headlines, and the most-read stories and comment threads. The service will also aggregate news from other sites. Read more about it here.
- CircleUp launches embeddable widget. CircleUp [review], the social-planning service has a new widget called MyQuestions that lets people add their questions and subsequent list or responses to blogs, Web sites, or social-networking profiles. Users can interact with these widgets and respond without having to leave the site.
- MediaMaster adds iTunes importing. Users of MediaMaster [review] are now able to import music from their iTunes music libraries. They can also view their songs in a new list view that shows all their tracks. The team is currently working on a Facebook app to let users share their music libraries on user profiles, similar to Last.fm's efforts.
CircleUp, the RSVP-like service that launched at Demo 2007 a few months ago, has announced a partnership with e7 Sports, a management service for small sports teams. CircleUp will be added to the list of tools coaches can use to elicit responses from a bevy of parents and players about things such as uniform sizing and carpools. It's the mailing list re-done, this time with a centralized way to see other people's responses.
If you find yourself trudging through massive e-mail threads and having to hit reply-all, CircleUp would likely be more helpful. The service provides some simple tools to organize and syndicate responses to any question you create. You can choose how you want people to respond, with one of several templates such as yes or no, multiple choice, or fill-in. When you're done crafting your question, you can send it out to contacts by e-mail, instant messaging, and SMS.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
What's great about the CircleUp is that answering a question doesn't require your recipients to register with the service. No matter what platform you've delivered the message, they just need to click on a link and fill in their answer. Once a recipient has answered, they can view how everyone else has responded. There's also the option to go back and change an initial answer if they see something that changes their mind.
CircleUp doubles as a business tool. You can export the results to an Excel spreadsheet, which is especially helpful if your question employed forms (useful for collecting people's personal information for a mailing sign-up or a directory). There also are some placeholder graphics for printing, e-mailing, and exporting to services like Google Calendar and Jotspot--things that will be added to CircleUp later down the line (the service is currently in alpha).
Group decision making can be really tough, especially coordinating groups more than four people. While it's easy if you're all in the same place and can talk about it, more than likely you're trading e-mails. Despite Google's Gmail handing the reply-all phenomenon really well with "conversations," it can still get a bit ridiculous. CircleUp is fairly easy to use (my Mom would have no problems), and the results can be taken offline using the Excel functionality.
We lightly covered CircleUp's demo announcement in January. See also Evite and MyPunchbowl for event invitation services.
CircleUp describes itself as a "social-communication service." It's an e-mail and instant-messaging tool that allows users to send a single e-mail to a community and receive one, aggregated response rather than a flurry of incomplete or even tangential responses.
The Newport Beach, CA company is debuting here at Demo 07. It works like this: click that CircleUp toolbar embedded in your Outlook, AOL Instant Messenger or Yahoo Messenger window. Type in a question, choose how you would like to receive your answer from your community (examples: Who's bringing what to the potluck? What time works best for tomorrow's meeting?).
Your message is sent as an e-mail or IM from you to the community, with no registration required to answer back. The aggregated responses are returned to the questioner via an RSS feed.
CircleUp's sociability can be scaled, too. You can choose to keep your question confined to your intended closed community, or you can open it up to the larger group of CircleUp users. The toolbar is free and can be downloaded from desktop or browser widget.
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