In the old days, before Google Hangouts and sexting, kids used to invite each other to events like concerts, stonings, and bear-baitings. Inviteful hopes to bring us back to those halcyon days of dog fights and bare-knuckle, couples-only fistfights by making it easier to invite friends to stuff.
Created by programmer Christian Hresko, the app allows you to create events using a mobile interface and notify friends that they’ve been invited. You can add photos of the location, and check invitation histories, and friends without Inviteful will receive SMSes if they’ve been invited. It also syncs with iCloud.
Hresko says that the goal is to offer a mobile-only interface for adding invitees on the fly. He was a senior software engineer at Sony Ericsson and worked for 8tracks and ngmoco.
“This started ten weeks ago as a social calendar and quickly pivoted to an event organization tool/app,” he said. “After thinking about the event organization space, I realized this is only one part of the puzzle, which is event discovery. This first stage, Inviteful for iPhone, solves the problem of event invitations on mobile.”
He bootstrapped and built the app himself over the past ten weeks. It has a very focused interface, with a who, what, where system that ensures users aren’t bogged down by extraneous UI elements. It seems like a great solution for planning off-the-cuff events like meetings for coffee, dance marathons, and sexual flash mobs.
The app is free and available for download on iOS now.