Replacing Evite
So I hate Evite, even when it brings me to cool parties. You know who you are. Encouraging my friends to enter social network information, and then using it to contact me feels tremendously invasive. Failing to understand that annoys me. Their lame privacy policy infuriates me. Their success at co-opting my friends to sucking out my privacy infuriates me.
Their failure to include information in their emails infuriates Scoble:
The evite email that I have doesn’t have any information on it. It doesn’t tell me where the party is. It doesn’t tell me when it starts. It forces me to click over to the Web site to look at all that info. I really, really hate that (because I drag emails from people to my calendar to keep the date and I hate clicking away from my calendar just to learn pertinent information because the service an inviter used is trying to collect page views by forcing me to visit the site).
And so I look forward to their contempt for their users killing them. Scoble mentions MyPunchBowl.com. I’ve been looking at Darkguest–I’d love it if they’d open source their code. I could run darkguest on my site, and control the privacy issues myself. Anyway–use one of these. Not Evite. You’ll be the cool kid with the best new party toy.
Photo: “Letter” by Just4you.
Hey, I have used darkguest before, I did’t like it though its an evite copy cat and just like mypunchbowl very unimmaginative. I built a similar service with a twist. I feel that events are planned together _with_ the group and not dictated _to_ the group as evite, punchbowl, darkguest, etc.. make it. I created Planypus (http://planyp.us) its a Wiki for your social life. We allow everyone to comment, add places, adn times, and really make planning event fun and collaborative…hope you can check us out.
I think my former co-workers are still laughing about my (very audible) reaction when I read my home email from work and found an Evite a couple years ago.
Your post captured my feelings perfectly, and used about 15 fewer curse words.