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.
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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."
Coordinatr is a new events communication service that's been designed for creating spontaneous get-togethers among tight knit groups of friends. The setup is similar to MyPunchbowl and Crusher, with just a few form fields that need to be filled out to create an event. What makes the service particularly useful is its integration with high profile media sharing sites and a great mobile service that lets you send quick distributed messages to the rest of your party friends.
While MyPunchBowl was one of the first of these services to really embrace that people using these services share their party media elsewhere, Coordinatr takes the process a step further by giving everyone with access to the event page a special tag to use. Adding that tag to photos (on Flickr) and videos (on YouTube) will automatically add them to the community page without requiring anyone with administrative access to the event to have to link up content manually.
There are all sorts of notifications options for Coordinatr. All of them can be toggled through various e-mail addresses and even SMS text messages to various phones. (click to enlarge)
(Credit: CNET Networks)Besides media sharing (usually an afterthought when the hangover wears off), the core part of the service--inviting and adding friends, is all handled through Plaxo, which lets you plug in your e-mail credentials and nab contacts without having to create an invite in each e-mail service. Pretty standard stuff really, but Coordinatr is smart enough to let you create custom groups of friends from those contacts that you can send out quick invites en masse.
Those same people on your quick lists can also elect to sign up to a mobile notification service that lets you send out SMS notifications, be it a quick location change or other important information. If I were to go back in time to my high school days, I could see this being a helpful way alert the rest of my fellow partygoers if the cops had just shown up.
At first glance I was quick to dismiss Coordinatr as a late entrant to the events planning game, but it brings to the table a few handy features that innovate the space. Whether that's enough to push it into people's minds when they're planning events might be a stretch. I often run into a lot of resistance urging some of my friends to try out some of the newer events services we write about. Many are simply ingrained in old systems such as Evite, with too much fear to try some of the next generation planning services like Socializr, MyPunchbowl, and Crushr to avoid confusing their guests.
The best way going forward may simply be a convergence app for all of these events services, similar to what we've seen with tools like FriendFeed, Profileactic, et al. People want one place to view all this information, and there's still not a service that does it.
Your party start page has your events, plus events your friends are taking part in. (note: we'd never have a Webware party on a Monday)
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams has released a new Web site in "gamma" called Socializr.
Friendster, which just patented another networking technology to bolster profitability, is credited with sparking the social-networking craze among Internet users.
Abrams' Socializr, meanwhile, offers online tools for event planning. Users can send personal messages or invitations, post public invites or notes on forums, design invitations and upload photos for albums, in addition to creating personal or company profiles.
The site has been in private testing since September 2006 and went live on Friday, according to Socializr spokesperson Toni Graham.
Socializr, it seems, is very into keeping a sense of humor about itself. According to Socializr's site, the company motto is, "Don't be boring....because Google already took 'Don't be evil.'" The message on the Socializr phone hotline informs callers that "we are too busy partying or writing software to answer the phone right now....For press...send an e-mail. If you are an angry blogger, please hang up. Thank you and party on."
Abrams' continued ties to Friendster are also evident. Socializr counts among its investors Friendster President Kent Lindstrom.
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