Remember Socializr, the party planning and event management site founded by Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams? The site launched in 2006 as the Evite 2.0, but was unfortunately was forced to lay off all of its staff last Fall. It looks like there’s a good end to the story, as start to finish party planning site Punchbowl is announcing this evening that it has acquired Socializr. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Socializr, which raised $2.25 million in total, is similar in function to Punchbowl and coordinated party planning and invitations for consumers. Last year, the startup launched Event Connect, which allowed users to aggregate and respond to all of their events from sites like Facebook, Meetup, MySpace, and Evite in one place.

Matt Douglas, Punchbowl’s founder and CEO, says that his company is acquiring all of the assets, underlying technology, and domains associated with Socializr (he declined to reveal how many active users Socializr currently has). Douglas says that eventually all users will merge together in Punchbowl. He adds that Abrams will not be joining Punchbowl, but that he will “maintain a close relationship” with the party planning startup.

Punchbowl seems to be growing strong, the startup has grown to one million registered users and rebranded from MyPunchbowl. The platform allows users to create beautiful online invitations and track RSVPs. The platform also provides tools that let you find supplies, organize an after party and even set a date, via an algorithm that recommends the best date for your party. The site also allows you to set up gift registries, save-the-dates, message boards, integrate Google Maps’ to display the location, and share comments, photos, and videos. Basically, Punchbowl helps you plan and organize an event from start to finish.

This isn’t the first acquisition for Punchbowl; the startup acquired local vendor listings site I’m In last November.

“It should feel snappier than it has in the past,” says Evite CEO Hans Wooley. Yes it should, with hipper clones like Pingg, Punchbowl, Socializr and Crush3r fast approaching. Even the moms have moved their PTA bakesale announcements over to Paperless Post.

But the MySpace of online invitation services refuses to take any lessons from these smaller, scrappier startups, something that even MySpace, to its credit, is now starting to do. It’s still slow (according to Alexa 76% of sites are faster than the old Evite.com) and it’s still full of ads.

This latest Fantasy Interactive-designed version boasts a much cleaner UI designed to take you straight to the invites, a marked improvement. Glomming off the socialized content trend, it has a new Facebook Events-like feature imaginatively called “Event Conversation,” where hosts and guests can comment and post pictures. The site also added hundreds of new still cheesy looking invitations and small functionality changes like being able to seamlessly add guests from past events to an invitation

I tried sending out an invite earlier today and the new site loaded “sending” and timed out before it told me that I needed more information to complete the process, even though I had all the fields filled out.

Then, despite the fact that the prompt was telling me I couldn’t send an invite, I got two successive emails in my inbox thanking me for sending an invite. Twenty minutes later I still hadn’t received my actual invite. So I’ll post what I did receive below.

That is not attractive anyway you slice it. Compare this with the welcome email I received and the invite I created on Pingg, which both arrived at the same time. Look ma, no Wolverine (or any) ad!

When I finally did receive an Evite invitation after trying three times, it looked like this, with no party information visible. There was absolutely nothing at all to aid a user in the decision of whether or not to attend. In stark contrast to Pingg, you’re basically forced to click though. 

When asked why the emailed invite was not at all informative, an Evite representative responded:

“We try to encourage RSVP and interaction with the invite, that is why event hosts love Evite, they get to track RSVPs and easily communicate with guests. Also, our business model is built on the invitation view, there is no advertising in the invitation email.”

The “Also, our business model …” aside speaks volumes. The new Evite can add all the social sharing and conversation functionality it wants but unless it pays attention to how people are actually inviting other people to things, it’s just another platform with the fatal flaw of refusing to understand that user experience should trump advertising revenue always. But especially when people can just use Facebook.

Their promo video and screencaps below.

Photo: Shoshie

We’ve heard from a couple of sources that Socializr has laid off most or all of the staff and that the site is running on autopilot. The company confirms cost reductions but won’t go into more detail on the scope of the layoffs. From founder Jonathan Abrams:

We are definitely not shutting down our site, or our operations, or the company, but Socializr has taken cost reduction steps to adjust both to the economic conditions and the time required to grow an event invitation service, and we expect these moves to help us get close to cash-flow positive, albeit on a very lean burn-rate, and last a couple of years without needing further capital. Additional details are company confidential, hope you understand.

Abrams is best known for founding Friendster in 2002, one of the first popular social networks. Friendster ultimately lost its pole position in social networking to MySpace, which in turn lost to Facebook. But Friendster created a template for a user profile and friending that is still used by competitors.

Socializr was dubbed “evite 2.0″ when it first launched by various press, but it turns out that it’s probably competitive pressure from Facebook and others that have doomed the service. Evite hasn’t evolved much, but more social invitation products, such as those offered by Facebook, have stolen a lot of new user growth. Socailizr, which never had a huge user base, can’t compete with what is essentially a side feature at the mammoth Facebook.

Compete shows Socializr peaking at 90,000 or so monthly U.S. visitors earlier this summer, which is certainly not enough to sustain a venture backed business. The company raised a total of $2.25 million over two rounds, the latest in 2007.

It doesn’t look like Socializr is shutting down any time soon, but it’s definitely on DeadPool watch. Let’s hope it can find a way to pull out a win, even a small one.

Real Time is the new black. Everyone’s doing it, or wants to be doing it. Even Google says it’s one of the biggest challenges in search today (making sense of all that real time data).

So it isn’t surprising that people are making fun of it. Jonathan Abrams (who has mocked Incubators of Incubators and Feed aggregators, now goes after Real Time with FutureFeed, which “answers the simple question: What will you be doing?”

“Are you sick of hearing what your friends are doing after the fact?” FutureFeed asks. “FutureFeed tells you what your friends are doing before they do it!”

Like Google Future Search, this is a joke. And it’s a good one, at least for those of us who’ve jumped on the Real Time bandwagon and haven’t looked back. Enjoy.

When he’s not mocking the Internet, Jonathan builds a real startup at Socializr.

Socializr, an Evite competitor that allows users to coordinate party planning and invitations, is launching a new product today called ‘Event Connect’ that allows users to aggregate and respond to all of their events from sites like Facebook, Meetup, MySpace, and Evite in one place.

The site has integrated with each of these social networks/event sites using services like Facebook Connect, allowing users to see available events that they’ve been invited to, as well as the events their friends are attending. Each of the sites that Socializr taps into has different degrees of support when it comes to friends and photo sharing, so some options won’t always be available.

Because the site can showcase both the events you’re attending and those being attended by your friends, things can get crowded quickly. So Event Connect also features a number of filters, allowing you to specify at what thresholds you’d like an event to appear on your radar (for example, I can specify that I only want to view events being attended by five or more of my friends). Event Connect can also pull photos from multiple sources, like Flickr and Picasa, and display them side by side. Finally, the service makes it easy to send invitations to an event across multiple social networks, like Facebook and MySpace, at the same time.

Socializr’s Event Connect sounds like a solid idea, especially for users who have their event invitations scattered across a half dozen social networks and Evite-like services. But it’s still another pseudo-social network that I’ll have to keep tabs on – I’d much rather get a weekly digest in my inbox letting me know which events are coming up rather than have to keep revisiting the site.

If you like your invite apps dead-simple, check out Mobaganda. You don’t even have to log in. Just click on start, add the name, date & time, and location, and create an event. The site, which is built on the Google App Engine, generates a Webpage that you can e-mail out to all of your friends.

Once the recipients go to the URL they can RSVP, and you can keep track via RSS or by checking back at the unique URL, which lasts for 30 days. (One downside is that no two events can share the same name during that time period).

Here’s an invite page I made in about a minute for a fake TechCrunch party:

The site generates an e-mail address that can be used to contact everyone on the RSVP list. You can also keep track of the RSVPs through Google Reader:

Or as a widget on iGoogle:

Not that we need more ways to invite friends to parties (see Pingg, Socializr, MyPunchbowl, etc.). But Mobaganda does reduce the process to its bare essentials. (The UI sensibility reminds me of Presdo). It got started as a conversation between Web developer Jason Stirman and Twitter founder Evan Williams. the question they were pondering: Would it be possible to create a better Evite, without even requiring a signup or login?”

Stirman is the creator of OhDon’tForget, a Ruby-on-Rails app that lets you send yourself pre-set reminders via text message (Time picked it as one of its 50 Best Websites last year). Stirman plans on adding text reminders to Mogabanda using OhDon’tForget (when you RSVP, you will be able to add a cell number to get a reminder the day before the event). he is also thinking of ways to add notes, maps, and other features. But he wants to keep it as simple as possible. After all, it is supposed to be the anti-Evite.

The Popula home page says (in German) only “Popula is an event calendar of all for all. Whether party, concert or children’s birthday. Here you will find what you are interested. Register now and test!” People who’ve email them for more information hear nothing back. All visitors can do is enter their email address and wait for more information. Or, they can read the Popula blog, which has just three entries.

Two of those three are the videos linked above, titled The Early Adopter Song! (Part 1) and The Early Adopter Song! (Part 2), featuring songs about early adopters and beta testers, along with images of bloggers, entrepreneurs and other people in the startup community.

German bloggers can’t stop posting the videos and speculating about what the service might be. And all those links are creating enough buzz and driving enough traffic to the unlaunched site that it’s almost as large as some competitive startups (Alexa thinks it has a larger reach than Socializr, for example). And since the company won’t respond to email inquiries, the speculation grows.

Would the same gimmick work in the U.S.? No – people might think it was entertaining but it likely would be drowned out in the noise of startup news (I think it would have worked in 2005 though). But in Germany, a which has a much smaller tech startup community and an odd taste when it comes to entertainment, it seems to have hit a nerve.

Thanks to Jessica Neuhaus for the tip.

So there’s still room for the killer event site, and startups keep trying. A couple of weeks ago we wrote about MadeIt, a new site that not only allows users to create new events but also to add content before and after. Like the others, though, it centers on the invitation to an event and whether you are going or not.

St. Louis based IMThere, which I discovered on TechnicallySpeaking, is a little different, and joins MadeIt as the most recent startups to try to crack the event nut. IMThere is focused less on getting invitations to events out to friends and talking them into accepting. Instead, it allows users to upload events, focusing less on the private invitation stuff (parties, dinners, etc.). Instead, the site’s early content is mostly about public events like concerts, video game releases, TV premiers, movie releases, etc.

Other users can then add their own content, ranging from comments about the event to uploading pictures from mobile phones during the event itself.

The resulting content is more interesting to the public than those private dinner parties. And top level navigation allows browsing by person, venue, artist, etc. So you can see all the events your friends participated in, see all the past and future concerts at a local venue, and see all past and future album releases and concerts by a particular artist. Users can also search events by popularity, region, etc.

The result seems to be a compelling user experience that could result in real local communities springing up and interacting around stuff that’s happening around them. Mobile interaction is excellent, so heavy users will be accessing it from all of their devices regularly.

See the demo/overview video here. There’s no guarantee IMThere won’t be in the deadpool in six months, but if they can quickly grow a core set of passionate users, they could have a nice property on their hands. IMThere is the first project from parent company Ramped Media.

I’m 90% certain we’ll hold this on Tuesday night at 7pm at a yet undisclosed venue. If you are attending, please register through the link below.

Event Registration

From what I’m seeing it isn’t nearly as interesting as Skobee or Renkoo in terms of setting up events. This could just end up being one more social network to sign up for…