Alternative To Evite: Renkoo
There’s a new website out there hoping to compete with Evite, the popular electronic invitation system. Renkoo, which just opened it’s public beta, is a web 2.0 version of evite. The design and color scheme is very cutesy and the AJAX code makes sending out evites easy on the eyes. I signed up and the only problem I noticed was it was a little slow loading. It’s still in beta though so I expect there to be a lot of problems. My favorite feature so far is being able to import all of my contacts from gmail. It also works for other popular emails like hotmail, outlook, etc. From what I remember, evite did not have this feature. Another cool feature is you are able to add your chat name and it will notify you by Aim or whatever you use about upcoming events. Also, it automatically uses your flickr profile picture for your Renkoo profile picture too!
Some things I noticed that it did not have that evite does are:
1. You can’t create unique invitations with cool themes
2. The profile information is simple and boring. Evite allows you to add your favorite restaurants and review it. I kind of liked that feature even though not everybody used this.
3. From what I see, you can’t see when people view your evites. This was a nifty feature to see if people actually got your evite or not.
One thing I will not miss about Evite is that whenever I sent out invitations about 10% would usually not get it for whatever reason. I hope that does not happen with Renkoo. Perhaps I will try them out the next time I need to send an invitation out.
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Posted: 27 December, 2006 in Cool Links.
Comments
Comment from Nadizzle
Posted: December 28, 2006 at 11:16 am
I like the penguin logo they have… so cute.
Comment from suki
Posted: December 28, 2006 at 8:50 pm
Looks like the competitors found you. ;) Are you going to do a review of them also?
Comment from yangbot
Posted: December 29, 2006 at 10:13 am
I read about renko on someone else’s blog. that’s what I was trying to get chris to make!
Comment from Yan
Posted: December 28, 2006 at 9:03 am
Hi, I would love to get your feedback on Planypus, we’re a competitor to Renkoo that launched in early November. We have a slightly different take on things, but are trying to solve generally the same problem..casual event planning
In response to your points:
1. You can’t create unique invitations with cool themes
– Planypus allows you to use basic formatting (bold,italics, headings, pictures) or basic html when creating your plans so you can spruce it up a bit
2. The profile information is simple and boring. Evite allows you to add your favorite restaurants and review it. I kind of liked that feature even though not everybody used this.
– Planypus has basic profiles that help you find people, but we don’t feel that profiles are the central piece of planypus. We try to make things easy and qucik which means people are more focused on making plans, less on maintaining profiles (don’t they have enough to do with facebook and myspace :-)
3. From what I see, you can’t see when people view your evites. This was a nifty feature to see if people actually got your evite or not.
– After some thought and reading people’s online articles we decided this was actually a bad thing. A lot of people felt violated by having evite automatically tell the organizer when they read the evite. Also, on Planypus the plan may have any number of organizers (its very democratic, anyone can suggest times and places, and edit the planspace which a wiki-like thing)…
Anyway, it’s quite a bit different from evite and it serves a slightly different purpose (planning casual things when you don’t know the time/place, or using the planspace to plan things like ski trips and so on)..check it out!