We are currently building more and more stat capability to be able to answer questions like that. Right now I can say that 2/3rds of plans have comments. The average number of comments is 12 per activity with an average of 1.2 comments/person.

From talking to some of the most active users, your analysis would seem to be correct (other than that they have to be singles)..mostly it’s preexisting social groups that like to do things regularly together and use planypus to decide what to do and when and where. There is also a significant portion planning long-term events like trips or vacations.

Edward, we will have reminders soon, we are currently focusing on stability and a big secret project that we can’t quite reveal yet :-). We will certainly have reminders before we come out of beta. Thanks!

Edward, I’ve used Yahoo Groups. People sometimes give feedback on dates that are suggested for meeting on the Yahoo Groups I’ve seen.

I suppose one could set up a Yahoo Group just for the sake of letting subscribers know about future events. Users can tune their subscription to the event feed. Too bad Yahoo doesn’t deploy SMS notification yet like GCal. I like being reminded of events on my phone.

Your very last idea is cool!

The other service I am amazed doesn’t exist - and this may just reflect the youthfulness of who is writing code - is the whole playdate/playgroup organizing thing for people with kids.

Well I guess the only way to answer is to say that so far 1407 plans have been made on planypus collaboratively in the 4 months it’s been up

You’re probably right that in most social circles its 20/80. I would even say it’s probably lower than that. Probably less than 10% of people in a social circle are what you would traditionally call active organizers. Those are the people who launch events on evite.

But what’s interesting about the planypus userbase is that it consists of two types of people right now. First are of course the early adopters and the people who are just pissed off at evite and looking for an alternative. The second and more interesting group is those that used to never send out evites, never initiate any plans, never send out emails, never even call people. These people are now using planypus because it’s so quick and easy to initiate an event when you don’t have to worry about organizing it.

There’s an interesting niche to be filled here. Despite the fact that only 10-20% of people in a social circles have enough patience to be organizers, it turns out 90% of the social circle has had an idea one time or another like “i want to do dinner” or “we should have a poker night” or “lets go skiing”. It used to be that they let these ideas slide because they didn’t want to organize them. Now they just put them up on planypus and let the actual organizers take over

As I posted in a comments a while back in my pseudo-economic analysis, it’s not even a clear benefit to the traditional event planner to have collaboration. The alpha dog sets the plan and decides the platform. Collaborative planning could work for big budget, time time forward things like travel.

Specifically, I see Evite as a service for an event planner to broadcast a event to her guests and get a pulse on the attendance interest. As a matter of sociology, how many casual events are truly collaboratively planned. My guess is that a small percentage of the people in any social circle do a majority of the planning, say 20/80 rule.

Planypus’ basket of features could work Twitter style if there is the force of community behind it. Twitter, to me, is the spirit of IRC rechanneled.

Voting widgets would be cool actually. We see things like that in forum mods all the time. A voting engine with portable widgets for various contexts would be killer.

I would venture a guess that when evite started it out it was just two college kids solving their own problem, a similar story to many of the new competitors. But if we do some retroactive market analysis we can see why Evite succeeded.

In 1998 there were two predominant modes of invitation 1. paper invitations (highly formal) and 2. emails, phonecalls, etc (informal). Evite ’saw’ that there was a market gap for those people that wanted the tracking capabilities and theming of formal invitations, but did not want the highly formal and slow aspect of doing snail mail invitations. Now we have evite. It’s almost as fast as email, but adds the ability to do theming and rsvp tracking. So there was a gap that evite filled.

Now fast forward to 2007 and let’s eliminate paper invitations now because we’re talking about the segment that uses the internet. Now we have emails/sms (informal, hard to track, hard to collaborate), and we have evite (formal, easy to track, hard to collaborate). Between these two options we now see another gap. There is nothing that can allow me to easily collaborate with my friends.

What to do when you are planning a trip somewhere with your friends? Or when you want to go out or get together and don’t know when and where. Well you’re going to need some way of voting, discussion, and probably a wiki if you’re going to do involved things like planning trips or larger events.

Countless groups are still using listservs for this purpose. Are they happy? No, almost every event organizer I’ve talked to including the savvy ones that are using wikis and listservs are not happy with these tools because they are too cumbersome in their tracking, notification, and discussion aspects.

So we see there is a gap between formal non-collaborative easy to track evite and informal somewhat-collaborative hard to track email that can be filled by a service that offers a highly collaborative environment, with easy rsvp tracking, and makes it informal by lowering the threshold to posting an event to under 30 seconds, and that works transparently by integrating with email, sms, rss, calendars, facebook, twitter, blogs, etc. That service is Planypus

Think about it. Let’s use Rapaille’s consulting for the Chrysler Jeep as a case study. What Rapaille doesn’t say is that SUVs and Jeeps are status vehicles. Who really drives them off-road? When someone is planning to spend $20-$40K on a status vehicle you bet they do their homework, eg look at all the competitive products in the space. When they change SUVs, they prefer to buy something that improves their image, which means they are open to new styles. Car makers change their styles every four or five years, so it is really an open game each buying cycle.

Invitations services is more like shopping for a car like Honda Accord or Toyota Camry; buyers want utility and reliability. That and people DON’T shop for invitation services. No average person says “hmm, I should try a new invitation service today.” If they do, they are victim to network effects, “if i try a new service, will my guests “get it?”" Only early adopters find status in trying new things. What do their friends think they see an invitation from an alternative service? “WTF is this?” The sort what they see in a instant, and that is where the positioning comes in. They will immediately think formal v informal. Of course, in the long tail, there will be pockets of early adopters, people new to invitation user services altogether, etc ripe for conversion, but i think the numbers will be small.