Renkoo
Pete Cashmore is pretty evenhanded in his comments about Renkoo, yet another Evite wannabe:
[from Renkoo Launches Social Networking Profiles, With a Twist][...] the way they’ve implemented the profile pages seems to break with convention: instead of spending hours adding info about yourself and loading up the latest bling and MySpace layouts, Renkoo’s profiles are based around questions and answers. Every week, your friends can ask one question of you, supposedly gaining more insight into your personality: see Renkoo founder Adam Rifkin’s page for more.
[...]
I’m still not convinced that this is a huge market or that anyone can rival Evite, but let’s give them a fair shot.
Ugh. Why do we have to give these services "a shot"? In this particular niche there is upcoming.org and eventful (skewed toward public events), facebook events, and of course the venerable Evite.
I dug up a 2005 piece from Wired, Evite's Success Invites Rivals, which chronicles the myriad companies athat have taken a run at Evite and died: TimeDance, Ivitemetoo, and Yahoo Invites. I visited RsvpHQ.com, which has a "this site for sale" sign at the header. Sendomatic seems to be chasing business customers (see here).
None these solutions really works in some radically better approach to setting up events, so why would people NOT use Evite? My belief is that a new entrant has to be 10X better to displace an established competitor, like Evite. And the Q&A approach to filling out a profile is a gloss: I don't even think its a better way to do it. Personally, I think the Facebook profile is boss, but even that doesn't motivate me to create events there (although hearing about Obama suppporters using it, does).
I am still waiting for the "ships in the night service" where I am informed automatically when friends are going to be in the same city as me, or attending the same events as me, so I can hook up with them. But it needs to be parasitic on my calendar or RSS feed: I don't want to manage yet another calendar.
Stowe
I think that Evite has many problems but it is good at what it does, it is a good party notification system without collaboration or conversation. The trick is not to compete with Evite and make a better Evite, rather to fill a void that Evite does not. The problem arises when you don’t know what you want to do and want to plan a casual event. In casual event planning a friend does not just announce what he is doing and other immediately abide. Rather, the group forms a consensus,
Many times in our lives we want to see our friends but don’t care or know what we want to do, where we want to do it, or exactly who will come. Some of us are fortunate to be able to call and email back and forth while most are not. At work and busy, we cannot spend 30min to an hour planning a simple casual event, as anyone that has ever planned something with more than 3 friends knows.
That is why we created Planypus. With Planypus it takes 10 seconds to suggest a get together and have your friends plan it for you throughout the day. We don’t even require registration or an organizer, in fact anyone can step up and finalize the plans at any time. We are not trying to replace Evite, but rather help all the people that want to go to happy hour after work but cant spend 30 min emailing or calling back and forth to plan the event.
Posted by: Alex | February 21, 2007 at 06:36 PM
Stowe:
You mention TimeDance was taking a run at Evite. Indeed that's true though that wasn't its original vision. TimeDance was originally founded to be more like TimeBridge-- to help busy professionals get together. But in the go-go-eyeballs-are-everything days a new CEO came in and tranformed the company to an Evite model. It didn't work so well. Timing is everything (pun intended) and we're hoping at least the spirit of TimeDance's original vision sticks now. We even have its founder, Mark Drummond, on our advisory board to help us get it right.
John
Posted by: John Stormer | February 23, 2007 at 04:56 PM