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."
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)
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If you're an event planner, there's a new Web service called Eventsbot that's set up to help you with some of the logistics of promoting, and selling tickets online. If you're familiar with EventBrite, Eventsbot isn't too far off: just set up your event, set ticket prices, promote it, and Eventsbot takes a small cut of the sales as its fee. The service is aimed mainly at event planners, but if you're looking to host a small event with controlled price ticketing, services like this can be a little more extensive than basic party invite sites, or build-your-own ticket sellers like Zaptix or TS.com.
Eventsbot comes in two flavors, a standard and premium. The standard is free, although you're not getting some of the more advanced features like event page customization, invoices and payments via PayPal, and integration of the invite page into your site's domain. Signing up for the premium service doesn't require a monthly fee or any contracts, instead the service charges a 2 percent fee on every ticket sold.
If there's anything to be said about improving the service, I found many of the hosted events didn't look very good. This can be remedied by "skinning" them with your site's CSS, but in terms of page layout and readability, I'm more impressed with EventBrite's offerings, as they're slightly easier on the eyes. Considering these pages are a front end for people to pay money and decide whether or not they're coming, first impressions can make a big difference.
Other event planning services include the aforementioned EventBrite, 123 Signup, Acteva, and RegOnline.
This invite isn't much to look at, but if you're an Eventsbot premium member, you can skin an event with your site's CSS.
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There's no doubt Yelp was going to add a local events and calendaring functionality to their popular user reviews service, and today they've done it with a new feature called Events. Coincidentally, last week brought about a refresh of Yahoo's Local service, which finally integrated Yahoo's own events service Upcoming.org.
Not surprisingly, Yelp Events is quite similar to Upcoming.org, with a landing page for each event, a comment board, and a list of yeses and maybes from community members to say whether they'll be attending. The main difference being the way user profiles matter. For Upcoming it's all about the events you've gone to or are going to, whereas Yelp's profiles center around your reviews and list of favorite places. That being said, Yelp has also integrated your track record of events into your user profiles, although the focus remains on reviews.
Another key difference is integration. Despite the refresh on Yahoo's part, Upcoming and Yahoo Local are still separate services. For instance, say you want to catch the Beastie Boys show at the Greek Theater tomorrow night in Berkeley. Upcoming can tell you about the venue, but first it'll have to spit you out to Yahoo Local. Yelp on the other hand, has their review ratings integrated so you can quickly tell if the venue is hot or not (sometimes literally) without making you feel like you're being jettisoned to a different Web service.
The one thing Upcoming still has is coverage. Yelp has only rolled out the events features to 10 major cities in the US including San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Seattle, San Jose, Austin, Chicago, Washington D.C., and San Diego. Don't be surprised if this makes its way to the rest of the Yelpified cities before the year's end.
Keep an eye on events in your city with Yelp's new events feature.
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