Google will now allow Google Voice users to invite friends to the service, the company wrote in a blog post on Tuesday.
Google Voice invites in action.
(Credit: Google)According to Google, Voice users have been requesting to "share Google Voice with friends and family." To satisfy that desire, Google will now allow users to invite up to three friends to the service. The invite-a-friend feature is being added to accounts over the next few weeks, so not all users will have the option of inviting others immediately. According to the company, the "Invite a friend" link will appear on the left side of the user's in-box.
When users want to invite a friend, they need only to input the recipient's e-mail address, add a brief message, and send it off. The recipient will receive the message and a link allowing them to sign up for Google Voice.
Google Voice, which has been in the news quite a bit lately over its inability to gain access to Apple's App Store, requires those who want to sign up for the service to submit their e-mail addresses to Google and wait to be notified that they can sign up. The invite-a-friend feature, Google reasons, gives them another opportunity to gain access to the service.
Although Google Voice users will only be able to invite three people at first, Google did say in its blog post that it will be providing more invites in the future.
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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InterActiveCorp's Evite might still be the biggest name in online invitations, but Martha Stewart has made her endorsement elsewhere.
Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia has partnered with and made an undisclosed investment in Pingg, a much smaller competitor.
The chief executive of New York-based Pingg, Lorien Gabel, spoke to CNET News a few months ago to make the case for his company as a more refined alternative to the clip art-friendly Evite, saying he hoped Pingg would be appropriate for "a whole segment of event types that people just (do) not want to use electronic invitations for," like graduation parties and bar mitzvahs.
Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia said in a release that its investment in Pingg was designed to improve its digital presence. Through the partnership, Pingg will be promoted and have its tools worked into the Martha Stewart Web site; Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia will sell ads on Pingg, and some of its content will appear on the invitation start-up's site. Joseph Holland, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia's vice president of strategy and development, will join Pingg's board of directors.
This certainly gives Pingg an advantage, as it has plenty of other competitors attempting to eat into Evite's market share: MyPunchbowl, Socializr, and Renkoo are just a few of them.
Our request for a catfight between Stewart and IAC czar Barry Diller went unanswered.
Web party invitation and management service MyPunchbowl on Tuesday relaunched with a new look. While mostly a new paint job, the big, new feature is the invitation designer, which has been renamed as a "studio."
Where the service's former system had users simply picking colors, pictures, and some ready-made templates, the results of using the new tool resembles a real life paper invitation. Users can still select things like the coloring and background, but there are new flourishes like colored ribbons, textured backgrounds, and various form factors that mimic proper card stock.
The new designer lets you tweak each aspect of an invitation, right down to the ribbon.
(Credit: CNET Networks)All of this amounts to little besides the invitation page people visit. It doesn't show up (much) in the e-mail, and you can't have it printed and sent out, which would make the whole experience feel a little more fulfilling. Your newly designed invitation will simply sit alongside the party details. The company is pushing the "green" aspect of this, but it's a shame you can't get your handiwork turned into a real-world good. Like Moo.com's mini cards, there's something fantastic about quirky designs for everyday things that could make MyPunchbowl stand out from competitors like Evite, Facebook, and Socializr.
Speaking of which, I think the service is still running up against bad public perception. Many people I know simply go to Evite because it's what they've always used. Also, when MyPunchbowl first launched, one of its stumbles was the e-mail invites, which were promptly being delivered to people's spam folders. Since then, it looks like the problem has been fixed, as I tried sending out an invitation to Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and my work e-mail. All went through without a hitch.
The other big hurdle, which I've pressed on in the past, is the big competition from Evite and social networks like MySpace and Facebook which have integrated events management services. For many, including myself, this is just an easier option--even if it's not a better one. To its credit, MyPunchbowl has done a great job at letting people suck in contacts from elsewhere, then turn around and advertise it at those places from the very same tool. Going forward, it's simply going to be a question of whether or not people will be willing to go through all that just to have a better functioning invitation.
Here's a video of MyPunchbowl founder and CEO Matt Douglas talking about the new design tool. It's worth noting you can't use it unless you're a registered user.
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.
This afternoon TripSay, a travel site that's currently in private beta is opening up to a larger group of testers and launching a few new features. The service will help you figure out places you should go on your vacation based on a calculator that will narrow down the results based on your budget, lingual ability, and comfort zone for going off the beaten path. You can also plug in your interests, and add ratings of places you've already been.
All of this information is taken and mapped out for you while being combined with what other TripSay members have put in as their favorites. The idea is that you can browse around other people's experiences and begin to plan out your own escape from the working world.
This isn't a new idea by any means, but TripSay does have some good things going for it. For one there's simple linking to media publishing services you're already using like Flickr, YouTube and Blogger. I've seen some travel sites come through and attempt to steal away that conversation from popular blogging tools with their own solutions, so it's worth a kudos for any site that recognizes the mass market will go with what their friends are using.
Also useful is the new groups feature. Groups let members join up and share places that have exceptionally good offerings in a particular interest. For example, the freeskiing group has compiled a list of some hot spots around the world which can be cross referenced with each recommender's likes and dislikes. That way if you're a newbie skier, by checking out someone's recommendations you can make sure their skiing habits don't tend to require a helicopter.
To expand on that, there's also an "expert" section. Similar to Yelp's idea of "Elite" members, TripSay premier users have more gravitas than new users based on their past interactions on the site, either in submissions or discussion.
The service is currently in private beta, but we've got 500 invites for Webware readers. To get yours just shoot an e-mail to info@tripsay.com with the subject line "Webware."
Find places to go based on your travel tastes with TripSay.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
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."
Remember Brightkite, the social network meets microblogging tool we wrote about last week? The creators have been nice enough to grace us with 100 invites to give away to Webware readers. Just fill in the Wufoo form after the break and we'll get one your way as soon as we can. Invites will be sent out once all 100 spots have been taken.
Update: All gone. Sending them out to folks now--check your spam boxes.
Ever come across one of those Facebook Platform applications that required you to spam a dozen of your friends with invites before you could access the results of your "Vampire Jedi Zombie Personality Quiz"?
They're annoying. And now Facebook has done something about it. Developer applications must "offer some navigation option to leave the friend invite process," according to a change in the social-networking site's platform policy. If an application's friend-invite page doesn't contain one of Facebook's in-house "Skip This Step," "Cancel," or "Skip" buttons, it has to contain an alternative way to navigate away from the friend invite process.
Developers whose applications ignore the new regulations reportedly receive warning letters that threaten shutdown if they fail to comply.
This is a big step toward cleaning up the cluttered Facebook app directory. Ideally, it will cut down on some of the "app invite overkill" that's led many Facebook users to groan every time they're invited to the corny application du jour. And it'll likely mean that Facebook members will probably only be passing on invites to applications they actually like, rather than spamming their friends just so they can learn what character from Hannah Montana they most resemble.
It will also mean your friends won't have to know that you even installed such an abhorrent application.
The Hulu team has set aside a big block of invitations to its private beta for Webware readers. If you want to try out the TV streaming site started in partnership NBC and News Corp., sign up here for access.
I like the service a lot. It's a great place to catch up on shows you and your Tivo miss. It also has some great archives, like early Firefly episodes. But for some inexplicable reason, it only has a few shows from Season 1 of 24, starting with Episode 6.
Other than that, it's well worth checking out. See review: Hulu Looks Great.
