I was able to literally creat a super stylish event in under a minute. The look of the invites is very well done. I recently hosted a party for a 100 people easily and quickly. They have super nice mapping capabilities, great messaging. I love the way the address book and guest lists are organized.

The themes are very well done. Very easy and super intuitive to use. I didn’t spend time figuring out how things worked or where certain features lay. Everything was easy to find and flowed correctly.

Overall very good site. Goodbye evite/ renkoo/ skobee

For two recent reviews that explain some of the power of Diigo, see: Under the Radar: Self Optimize and Adapt… and Intelligent Agent: Social Bookmarking for Enterprise Knowledge Management, which reviews several sites, including Diigo.

I won’t speak for Renkoo but on Planypus if you send the invitation to your friends no one has to sign up. They get the full event details in the email and they can rsvp from the email or even add it to their google calendar, facebook ,etc. If they do want to click through to the site, by all means they can do that and they will never be required to sign up!

This is why planypus is so useful. In a group of ten people if you send out a planypus saying let’s go out to dinner, five people might give you suggestions about where to go ad the other five might not really care, so it works both ways. Eitehr way you as the organizer benefit from having other people help you plan it, and all your friends benefit from not getting cc-ed on a crazy reply-all email thread that usually ensues when these things are planned by email.

Another important aspect of these new technologies is choice of notification. With planypus I can use email, rss, sms, gcal, facebook, twitter (launching soon), all of these things as tie in points so that I don’t have to go to the site to get notified…this is a big key. A lot of the old school technologies as well as some of the new ones still make you do silly things like click through to the site to get details. This is a thing of the past because people are using aggregators, mobile technologies, etc, so it’s silly to expect them to come to your site, and we don’t. We make it as easy as possible for you to get your event information and export it anywhere you like!

1) Universality. Unlike IM social networking sites or even twitter, I could use any email provider and program. Addresses took care of this – I was someone@somewhere.com. You didn’t have to be on somewhere.com, somewhere.com didn’t require you to signup with them to email me. No profiles or anything – just compose a message, address it to me and send. Need to send me a file? Just attach it.

This lead to a another flavor of universality – at some point, you could count on everyone having email. One group of my friends used to plan things over the phone… then most people got email – and the last hold out who didn’t see why she needed a computer got one just for email… because the rest of us had email and that’s where the action was moving.

These two lead to the third kind of universality – you could use email to do a lot of different things… send contracts back and forth with the lawyers, arrange drinks with a friend, send a love note to your boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse… what ever. It was (and is) like computers themselves – a general purpose tool that could be molded to the user’s desires and needs.

IM took off because it shares many of the same strengths and adds useful things like presence indicators and because it feels better for quick conversations.

fragmented, specialized services try to turn all of this on its head – can I use Renkoo/Planypus etc without having everyone signed up? Twitter is fun… but unless I can get some number of my friends and colleagues signed up it’s not that useful to me.

I think Stowe Boyd’s right – the intelligence needs to move to the edge, to the individual with lightweight means to connect us and let us interact in a myriad of ways.

…Email use for collaboration and personal correspondence may decline, but that does not necessarily mean email marketing follows suit…

Here’s the post from GigaOM on free text messaging services:

http://gigaom.com/2007/03/12/free-sms/

tmapic: I haven’t tried Pipes yet, but it seems really useful. Thanks for sharing your experiences.

It would be great to attempt to understand why email did become so ubiquitous. Takeaways from that would probably signal what methods will become entrenched near term. I do admire the fact that you broached a topic that forced me to think about a paradigm shift. Thanks for pointing out Om’s article – I’ll definitely check that out.

Shikash: indeed text messaging should play an important part in moving away from the email channel… but the carrier pricing makes it difficult right now. Did you see GigaOM’s article on free text messaging services?

Note I said these tools give hints of the future, not “a unified predictor of dominant future communication methods” as you put it. In fact, I’d question whether there is going to be anything as dominant as email has been… will future generations be more willing to use as Rick O calls them “different tools for different jobs”: wikis for document collaboration, photo blogs for sharing pictures, IM for quick questions, event planning services for scheduling telecons? Or will we keep defaulting to email?

While I am amused but the current “social networking” trend … has anyone stopped to think about the difference between social networking and communicating? At least in my world, communication implies valuable and quantifiable data exchange, not just the niceties and protocol. Otherwise, we’re back to high-chinned aristocratic nods as wee pass eachother in the streets.

To use the most prevalent (and reviled?) example, while I would say that myspace may be good for networking, I would in no way ever associate it with communication. Similarly, I would say that email, while it can be used for networking, is more of a communication tool. (Indeed, how many studies have shown that email actually distances people from each other and is dissociative?)

Texting and IM can straddle the line depending on who is using them and how. But where is the communication part of Twitter? What are you learning? There’s more to communicating than “hey, how are you?” at the watercooler.

Different tools for different jobs.