Tonight I decided to plan an event. Last year, a bunch of the people I worked with at a now defunct tech company got together for drinks after the winter holidays. It was great seeing them and I thought we should do it again. To organize last year’s event I used Evite, “Evite.com is the top online destination for invitations”. It has been around for a long time and it works well enough. I thought I’d see what new shiney tools were out there in the event planning/invitation space.
I immediately revisited Brian Solis‘ Conversation Prism on flickr. I remembed seeing “Events” listed on one of the petals. Based on the services I see there, I decide to look into socializr and madeit. While looking at these services I post the following on twitter: “socializr.com or madeit.com anyone prefer one over the other?”.
One Minute later I get the following response: “@johnrhopkins I like http://anyvite.com but that’s because I built it! Seriously though, check it out, you can try it without registering!”
It was self-serving yet honest. At this point I had already been looking at the other two services for a few minutes and not been terribly impressed with the look of the final product. I give it a click and run through the steps. I make an event, invite some people and it works. Not only does it work, but I like it better than the other two.
From my view: I had a question. I asked the twitter cloud. The cloud answered (very quickly). The answer was useful.
From @anyvite ‘s view: doing a competitor keyword search using twitters own search functions (previously named Summize) produced a result. He/she responded, suggesting their service. This resulted in a new customer.
Win/win
