To Evite or Not to Evite: Why Skobee was DOA
Renkoo released a public beta last week. My first impressions were "this is a pretty crude effort." But I had deeper misgivings about it, Skobee, and Planyp.us and other new entrants in group social planning that I couldn't quite articulate. Today those misgivings crystalized when emails flew back and forth about a dinner invitation tonight that was originated last Friday. What was my friend thinking when she made that invitation by email instead of using Evite? We know Skobee failed but why? What are the real challenges facing similar projects?
TO EVITE OR NOT TO EVITE?
That is the question. NOT TO EVITE means sms, email, or phone. Skobee, Renkoo, Planypus wanted or want to be a new alternative to SMS, email or phone in the NOT TO EVITE alternative. Problem is, those alternatives are too similar to evite and hence represent TO EVITE. You could argue how the voting mechanisms and the communications features represent novel features that really improve upon all the existing choices, but to evite using hipsters, they are more similar than different when the deep proposition is really
FORMAL OR INFORMAL
TO EVITE means FORMAL and NOT TO EVITE means INFORMAL. Informal is meant to be bumpy and imperfect. People willingly make that binary choice. For all the shiny different features, making them create and manage the invite on a site means FORMAL. However you want to spin it, Skobee et al represents merely another kind of FORMAL and Evite owns FORMAL. If you try your new social planning service on five hundred people and it doesn't take off virally from there, with a few nudges, you know you're slamming against the central proposition: you're too FORMAL to be INFORMAL and too similar to king evite for people to understand the difference in a glance.
[added later] I went to dinner with the friend and she told me that she wanted the dinner to be "intimate." I didn't probe deeply as it was a dinner but clearly she associated "intimate" with sending out personal email vs letting a social planning web intermediary handle it. I write more in the comments below, but I'm really fascinated to see the applicability of marketing and consumer survey tools in this domain.
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December 18th, 2006 17:23
Although I agree with your direction I disagree with your understanding of the industry and especially Planypus. I do agree that with the distinction of formal vs. informal inviting. Renkoo and Skobee are both more formal than Planypus in their approach. I think that the features you pointed out, the SMS, the RSS, etc… are more of add-ons for the users. More tools to help bring information to them according to their preferences. Planypus does not hold the user to having to plan the event. That is the biggest kicker. You don’t need to be an organizer. How much more informal does it get? That “I don’t want to be an organizer” link is what a lot of our users rave about. What other service lets you suggest an idea and let your friends decide? The biggest pro to Planypus is that it literally takes you 10 seconds ( you don’t even have to log on) to create a plan. It is in fact faster than email and much faster than a call that by the time it rings and connects will waste 40 seconds of your time. All you need to do is click “make plans” enter a title and click “send” you don’t even need to choose people as the standard is set to send to all of your friends. So unless you are physically in the presence of all of your friends Planypus is faster and more casual than virtually any other means of communication. I am not sure that it gets any more informal than that.
Now, add the fact that you are at work, where AIM is turned off, you can’t call, and like you said you don’t want a spam of emails flying around. You want to do something with your friends but don’t want to deal with organizing. You suggest an event on Planypus and let your friends figure it out for you. “To Evite or Not to Evite?” is the wrong question, the question should be “to Planypus or to Spam?”
December 18th, 2006 17:29
I agree that you are right in that the general user’s mindset is formal vs informal, but I disagree that Planypus has to be lumped into the informal category and the reason is you can look at our current userbase. Many people are making midweek plans (how often does that happen on Evite? look at their traffic charts..they basically spike as people are planning for the weekend). Planypus has a more even traffic graph suggesting people are using it all throughout the week for casual outings.
Planypus has changed the definition of what it means to be a ‘regular’ user because it’s a lot less formal. A ‘regular’ evite user probably uses it once or twice a month tops. A regular Planypus user uses the service 4-8 times a month. You wouldn’t use evite to invite 5 friends to go out for drinks or to the theater, but you would use planypus because it’s more convenient to arrange that way…
December 18th, 2006 17:33
Err I meant Planypus should not be lumped into the _formal_ category. Well you know what I mean
December 18th, 2006 22:21
I mostly agree with your opinion. However, though, Evite is not a social network. There are way too many applications, ads on the site to distract. I will never go to evite for social network purpose. If heyletsgo, renkoo, socializr etc can emphasize social networking aspects, one of them will succeed. Heyletsgo already showed some healthy traction. My new startup (still beta), on the other hand, helps meeting new people (not your existing friends) easy through group events hosted by any average users on the site. As you can say, it serves for dating more than anything else. But maybe that is enough to make it.
December 18th, 2006 23:29
I went to dinner with that gal, and other friends, and I asked her briefly about why she used email. She said she wanted the dinner to be “intimate” as if she were inviting friends over for dinner and that she felt “tracking the responses” would be a hassle. I didn’t really drill her since this was a holiday dinner and not a focus group.
The issue here isn’t really pure rational optimization but the web of mental associations that guide people’s choices. I’m guessing that if I probed more deeply, she will associate *using a web service* to plan with “formal” or “not intimate.” “Tracking responses” could mean, “I don’t want to check a website because I feel it is impersonal.” One really has to track down the emotional connections. It’s not all about logic. (Check out Zaltman’s work on the consumer mind.) Try this using your own friends and acquaintances as focus groups. Do not sell them on your idea first. Just ask them, when you have to make an invitation, why do you sometimes use evite and sometimes not?
I’m not saying Planypus et al are not more useful creatures. I’m saying that evite leaves a huge footprint in the mind that anything new service must cope with. When the meme reaches outside the core of young adopters who gladly surf the latest internet fads, do people get the new idea within two seconds? Or do they sort it according to and resort to what they already know?
Yan, perhaps people shouldn’t associate Planypus with a “formal.” However, reflexively they will associate any web service social planning intermediary machinery with “formal.” The naive average person a few rings outside of the meme epicenter will think “oh, another evite.” Educating and converting the mass market will be the battle. You’re looking at it in logical terms. Think more emotional association. Maybe in near future, we’ll be much more accepting of mediated planning.
About rational optimization — say the utility of this system gives an incremental delta(a) for democracy in choices and delta(b) for multimodal messaging over evite or sms/phone/email. Who really reaps delta(a) and delta(b)? If n people are involved, equal distribution is delta(a)/n. However, *the plan maker* choses the invitation platform, not the recipients, so the only driver is delta(a)/n.
However, most people are happy to follow, and the leaders are possibly more happy with just dictating plans, eg the plan maker might be happier with saying Tuesday 8 PM at Maggiano’s and not giving people any choice. After all, she’s likely a social alpha and the plan is her baby. So say the value to the plan maker of democracy is possibly less than delta(a)/n or 0 or even a minus.
The value to people not making plans is possibly zero as most people in any given invitation scheme are happy with the plan or can’t attend. Only the invitees who by happenstance need alterations to the plan benefit from it.
So the entire incremental utility of choice is randomly distributed among a few invitees who, again, are *not* the ones deciding on the invitation system to use.
(If it’s the same friends all the time planning and the group wants to make sure it’s fair to everyone then perhaps here a Rawlsian theory of justice kicks into play and the group demands a democratic platform.)
It’s like the government employee who must dole out Katrina contracts. If the money ain’t coming from her pocket and she collects strict scale salary in a lifetime guaranteed job, does she care if the procurement she makes is best or optimal for the government or the end users? What’s it to her? Hence we have $$$ wasted trailer homes that make the news.
The other aspect is the multi-modal communication, the delta(b) of incremental value. I don’t think the value of this is, outside of the CrackBerry brigade, universally on people’s radar yet. I think of it as a luxury that people have to be educated to want and then later will they demand it as a standard.
Right now, everyone is pretty much at work, at a computer 9-5 and plans are made during that time with activity most expected before the activity. Email and IM are the same. You get if you’re at the computer, not if you are not. Most people I know don’t check their emails on the phone and many don’t even SMS as much as they should. Omnipresence is not yet a standard feature of our social life, so delta(b) isn’t appreciated, and some might even think it is too impersonal.
As for the spamminess of social navigation email, I’m of two minds, one is of a rational optimizer and the other is of an anthropologist/sociologist. Most of the five or so emails that came back and forth were jokes on each other and the situation. We’re human and like to play with each other. No one altered the plan.
Where I think voting mechanisms could really work is for meeting scheduling between collaborators in an institutional setting where they could have real conflicts. That’s what the group calendars in Microsoft Outlook / Exchange are all about. But that’s not TechCrunch exciting.
Oh yeah, Grant, not sure where social networking fits into this convo, but I do totally agree if you mean that building community makes a lot of otherwise iffy ideas fly. Heyletsgo is a great example of that and so is Twitter. I’ll check out your service when I get a chance.
December 19th, 2006 11:46
Minger man that was a huge response, you should have written another article
All I have to say is the stats speak for themselves..in the last roughly 4 months since Planypus has been in beta usage, our heaviest users have planned an average of 10 things per month. Granted those are the heaviest, but I’m interested in how many evites the heaviest evites users send out per month….I do think there is a difference in social behavior happening.
You’re absolutely right that there is an uphill battle to displace the idea that anything on the web has to be formal. But look at the shift on consciousness that is already ocurring…5 years ago keeping a ‘journal’ online people would think you’re crazy. Now blogging is mainstream and commonplace.
Planypus is looking towards the future of socialization. As more and more people spend more and more time online, it is only natural that social interaction becomes more internet-based. We now use IM and text messaging more often instead of emails and phonecalls. Is it that far of a stretch to see that dynamic and wiki-like collaboration systems might make it easier to plan our social outings?
Maybe people aren’t ready for it yet..but the shift in consciousness is definitely occurring. Why else would so many companies all of a sudden be attacking this space. People usually start thinking of the same idea because globally these ideas are starting to permeate everyone’s brain. You know in the end we’re all gonna end up with those matrix style brainplugs anyway
It’s just a matter of time.
December 19th, 2006 14:01
Yan,
Didn’t mean to be a pooper. NO ONE loves technology and the future more than me!
Definitely our internal associations and ways of doing things will change over time. It’s the startups — Planypus, Renkoo, Skobee, etc. — that lead the way to the future.
A lot of these ideas depend on timing of other factors. I bet with the rise of interpersonal micropayments, presence ubiquity and mobile computing that a lot of these SRP systems like Planypus will become a lot more natural.
Talking about niche groups, maybe busy crackberry users, eg lawyers and IT peeps, might be a natural adopters for Planypus?
December 19th, 2006 23:12
It’s certainly quite possible. I don’t think you were beeing a pooper
I think you were being very realistic. Right now Planypus and similar services are things that nobody “needs”. They either use evite or they use the phone. But my point was just a short while ago nobody “needed” a cell phone, and nobody “needed” google, or even the internet. Can you live without any of these things now?
:=)
December 21st, 2006 18:35
I am VP Marketing for http://www.triphub.com. I love this discussion and agree that there are superior ways to coordinate than e-mail. We’re focused on a more specific niche of group travel planning (typically for existing social networks). I believe that beyond the formal/informal debate is the issue of complexity and utility. It’s relatively easy to call 5 friends and say let’s meet Friday for coctails. It’s significantly harder to coordinate the same group for a vacation to Mexico where you have to coordinate schedules, travel plans, lodging decisions, airport transfers, activities, and other decisions. So I believe the market segment will be a critical factor in determining success for all the Web 2.0 companies that include invitation and RSVP functionality (as most companies mentioned here do). Perhaps the bigger question is… how does everyone make money? eVite events tend to be dinner parties and back yard BBQs. People are spending $200. We, on the other hand, are happy to be helping thousands of groups plan trips where the cummulative gross spend can range from $2,000 - $50,000 depending on the size of group and length of stay. Of course, the burden is on us to provide enough value to extract our share of that spend. But as one of our customers told us the other day, “Wow! This is what the Web is for!” so we believe we’re off to a great start!
December 22nd, 2006 03:22
John,
Welcome to the party! Travel coordination has the same core issues as casual social coordination but given the cost and time, but here deliberation and agreement among the participants is much more important.
Just as one could book tickets or restaurants reservations through planypus, I see you can book hotels, flights, and settle accounts on triphub.
Looks like I have more blog entries to make…
-Ming
December 22nd, 2006 11:05
Thanks! Anytime you feel like writing about us, feel free. I’m sure my colleagues in the social planning arena feel the same way