CityCita is a service opening for public use today that lets you organize groups and meetings for free and within an open classification system. Will that be enough to differentiate this European version of MeetUp.com? The free part may be, but even that only goes so far. CityCita is a Paris and London based company that we’ve written about previously after a first peek at the private beta. The company tells me it’s been two years in development. Now that the site is going public, I have to admit I’m underwhelmed. The basic functionality appears solid and the price is good so I’m sure it will fill many peoples’ needs if marketed well. Go give it a look for yourself, maybe you’ll like it more than I do. As far as I’m concerned, marketing of the service so far has not been good. In early outreach to bloggers, the company said in May that it was planning to launch with the following features: Flickr photo sets for each group (done, good), Box.net integration for file storage (not done, and will be Amazon S3 instead), Eventful and Google Base automated submission of events (not yet), hcal microformats for all events (later). If those features fall into place then I’ll be more interested. CityCita emphasizes that their groups can be classified by any term or tag determined by organizers, instead of being limited to a finite number of categories determined by the service. That’s nice, but not a big deal. Tags may be the new hotness, but for mass adoption of an events system I imagine many people want a clear category tree. CityCita does have categories as well as tags. Also falling under the “not such a big deal” category, the service says it is unique in its support for “geolocation.” All that appears to mean is that the address I enter for an event gets tagged on a map and I’m given the option of searching Yahoo Local. Maps are only available for the US, Canada, UK, Spain, France, Italy, Germany and Japan. The service is even free only to group organizers who limit themselves to creating one group. Removing ads and having greater customization options will run you $9/month or $49/year. That’s cheaper than Meetup.com, but Meetup offers customer service, has a large established infrastructure and as they said when they started charging fees – “you get what you → Read More
After Meetup and recently reviewed Renkoo, France based CityCita is bringing up together a new service that help groups create group events in a smart way with a nice series of features. CEO Jamin Rubio mentionned they are about to launch the service in private beta next Monday and the services will be aimed at the US market first although anyone will be able to register the service. The interesting approach of CityCita is that is it truely group/topic based and geo-localized. You first need to register to start or join a new group which will eventually be accessible through a permanent URL (for example http://techcrunch.citycita.com). In order to do that you need to create a group, meaning any defining of choosing a tag (coca cola, jazz, web2.0, elvisfans,…) as well as a localization (a country and a city that are pre-defined). You can either leave that group for people to join or have limited access on based on an access code. As a visitor you can easily join a group by picking up first your interest through a tag cloud or a search and also find the closest group to your place of living. And if it does not exist then you are free to create one. Once your group is set up you can start doing all kind of things with CityCita starting by creating events. They integrated APIs of Google and Yahoo maps for you to be able to define precisely the venue of that event and share it with the rest of the group. You will be able also to feed your group with all kinds of elements like pictures (API of flickr is integrated) todo list, hosted shared items (any digital documents). You can virtually manage of all aspects of a given group and the list of features if quite complete (change layout, group name, nominate assistants, de-activate members, step down as organizer and nominate volunteers). An interesting feature is the “Spread the word” where you can find all kinds of tools to create buzz on your group on and offline for example with easy-to-build flyers. For a better view and screenshots click here The main difference with meetup is that it is really topic oriented meaning that you can really define your interest and not choose among a directory of pre-defined center of interests leaving room for any kind of specific group and passions. → Read More
