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I’ve been tracking Skobee, headquartered in San Francisco, since I first saw founder Noam Lovinsky demo it at a recent event at Stanford. Noam took me through a demo of the product again earlier this week to refresh my memory, and he opened the doors to the service earlier this evening (it looks like Dave Winer got a look at it too).
If you plan events with friends using email, Skobee is going to make your life a lot easier.
Instead of contacting all of the friends you would like to plan an event with through the normal channels (IM, email, phone, etc.) and trying to keep things organized, Skobee has a dead simple and better way to handle it. Create a new event, put in vague (or definite) information on location and date/time, and add emails for people you’d like to include.
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Skobee will then send out emails to each person along with the current event information, and they can register for the site if they are a new user (viral business model – yes). Here’s where things get interesting: those people can add new participants, and suggest changes to the date or place by leaving a comment with natural language, such as “How about Tuesday instead, and we’ll meet at TechCrunch”. Skobee will structure the data and update the event information for everyone. And even better: instead of logging into the site and leaving a comment, participants can simple “reply all” to the email, which includes “plans@skobee.com”, and skobee will figure out what event is being discussed, add a comment to the event page automatically, and update accordingly.
I’ve used Skobee to plan an event this week (see screen shot below), and all of the above functionality works pretty flawlessly.
Future plans include an “after party” page where Skobee will automatically pull flickr pictures from users and incude them on the page. Noam says this will be based on picture metadata time to know if the pictures apply, although I recommended that they use flickr tags instead or in addition to the metadata from the photos.
Skobee rocks.
