For all the talk about MySpace becoming irrelevant as Facebook starts to dominate the social networking market, does Evite have a future? Evite is a pretty much a one-trick pony: invitations to friends/family for social events. This is a market that Facebook could easily tackle, especially with Facebook Platform being launched last week.
I wouldn’t expect FB to enter this space any time soon, or ever. My partner and I started IPartee.com (based in Toronto) for exactly that reason; we’re set for a late July launch.
Looking forward to mesh,
CG
Chris,
Facebook already IS in this space, just with less functionality than Evite. Check out their Events app.
Same as they are in photo sharing, just with less functionality than Flickr.
Evite is old and a little bit broken around the edges. There are tons of new start-ups in this space, but they may find themselves struggling to compete with Facebook.
Paul
Facebook claims it already does 3x the volume of evite in invitations.
@Paul: Thanks for the comment. Yes, I’m very familiar with Facebook’s event features — however, these features do not meet the needs of users today. Here are just a few examples of problems with Facebook events:
- No venue pages
- No reviews
- No ticketing
- No way to plan events
- Countless other problems …
With established players like MySpace and Facebook, I think the barrier to entry for any social-network is huge (in the event space or not), but we also can’t forget the fact that many people who do not participate in social networks have needs too. IPartee in particular employs social-networking because it’s focusing on helping you plan your social life — social-networking is one of our features, not our entire product. Facebook doesn’t even begin to touch on so many significant problems in this industry, and events are something today’s youth interact heavily over. Events are not included in Zuckerberg’s vision for his company, and I think this is very clear following the recent direction of the site.
I encourage you to try IPartee when it launches later this summer, and I welcome any feedback you may have.
Of course with Facebook Platform, you could put IPartee functionality into Facebook for users to choose that instead of the native events system
http://developers.facebook.com/
@Paul: We definitely won’t do that — feel free to read my blog if you want to understand why
Is there a way to import events from evite to facebook or vice-versa? I think what is most needed in the world of social networking is easy import/export methods; the facebook platform seems a likely way to bring this about, but until I can connect Netflix (ratings and friends), Amazon (ratings and friends), IMDb (ratings), Facebook (everything), Flixster (now just a bridge to Facebook), Evite (with Facebook Events), etc., I think there’s a lot of work left to do.
yeah… why the hell isn't there an evite app for facebook yet?… this is 2009 for crying out loud.