Let's All Pile On - The Truth About FriendFeedFeed, Evite, Socializr, and Planypus

I've seen several posts (from Stowe Boyd and from a site that's not coming up right now) about FriendFeedFeed - a parody on our fascination with aggregation. (Which reminds me - let me know if you're reading this in my FriendFeed or MyBlogLog streams.)

I was poking around this morning, and most of the links are semi-non-operational - your usual story about "we're upgrading our servers" and all that. (Oh, to be a server seller in Siliconland.) But one link was operational - The Truth About Evite, supposedly written by "the founder of Socializr and Friendster." Sample text:

Evite was a cool Silicon Valley startup when it was founded way back in 1998. After the dot-com crash, it was acquired by InterActiveCorp (IAC) in 2001 for less than the $38 million in venture capital that Evite had raised.

IAC is a huge Internet conglomerate run by mogul Barry Diller and worth over $10 Billion. IAC owns over 60 businesses, including Ask Jeeves, Citysearch, CollegeHumor, Expedia, Hotels.com, HotWire, HSN, Lending Tree, Match.com, and TicketMaster in addition to Evite. Not surprisingly, after buying Ask Jeeves for $1.85 billion, Evite is not the top focus of IAC management. After acquiring Evite six years ago, IAC moved it down to the LA office of Citysearch and TicketMaster, and the site has languished ever since....

On April 3, 2007, Ticketmaster/Evite threatened to sue Socializr for copyright infringement....Evite/IAC seemed to prefer to attempt to block competition with lawyers instead of improving and updating their products. The Socializr team was very flattered that a multi-billion dollar company like IAC was so scared of our little company....

As Valleywag's May 3, 2007 "Hypocrisy Alert" pointed out, Evite's baseless claims also seem quite hypocritical and ironic when you remember Evite's announcement in 2003 that they were going to "mimic" Friendster.

I'll have to grant that some people are not impressed that the (unnamed) founder of Socializr is quoting Valleywag. Perhaps he or she is hoping that Barry Diller will off himself?

But are there reasons (other than bashing a competitor) that Socializr put up a FriendFeedFeed website? Probably not.

But at least one person wasn't impressed?

If their moto is "Don't be boring" then how much more boring can you be by copying Evite? Socializr fails at its own moto. So what if it pull profiles from social networks, and so what if it looks like a better evite? What problem is it trying to solve? As any organize knows, there are virtually no events made where one organizer says "lets go out" and everyone follows. In most cases there is collaboration with the group. Nothing out there, not Evite, not Renkoo, not Socialzr, not the now dead Skobee, helps the group plan the event together.

Well, gawrsh, too bad there isn't a service that does that...

That is exactly why we built Planypus (http://planyp.us) we make plan making together truly intuitive and easy (and yes we allow all sorts of sweet media integration with our plansapce as well)

Aha, yet another promotion. When will Planypus create a MyBlogLogLog website?

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