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March 9, 2006

Skobee Just Launched - So Start Using It

Michael Arrington

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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.

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.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 9th, 2006 at 12:23 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Andi

    March 9th, 2006 at 12:39 am

    looks very nice! i love the plain style!

  2. luca

    March 9th, 2006 at 12:40 am

    Nice, but I live in Italy and I can’t use it completely… I had to insert a fake ZIP code…

  3. Avi Bryant

    March 9th, 2006 at 12:49 am

    Yeah, Skobee does rock, but let me second the request for making ZIP code optional or supporting postal codes from other countries.

  4. Ravi

    March 9th, 2006 at 1:04 am

    Fandu!!! really cool!

    I was forced to insert a wrong zip code.

  5. Al Iguana

    March 9th, 2006 at 1:19 am

    How did you manage to organise an event in London, when you can’t even join with a London postcode? I’ve no idea what a “zipcode” is lol ;)

  6. Free ad...

    March 9th, 2006 at 1:21 am

    Nice!

    But US people gotta start to realize that you are the only ones that care about ZIP-code…

  7. radu ionescu

    March 9th, 2006 at 1:33 am

    Kind of off-topic - but with the name and look (colors & font) I was sure it’s a skype plugin or smth. It might help them (or not).

    Q - can univited people register, or is it just for closed events?

  8. David

    March 9th, 2006 at 1:36 am

    My eyes are hurting…

  9. Tejas Patel

    March 9th, 2006 at 1:55 am

    Looks an interesting concept, but based on what is described here does not sound too much lucrative. The fact that I have to force other users to register just to take a peak view of the events burns the desire to try this service out. How many of my family members and relatives will I be able to force to register just to see the venue of the event?

  10. Noam Lovinsky

    March 9th, 2006 at 2:01 am

    Hey Tejas - Your friends and family don’t actually have to register to see the details of the plan. In fact, if you invite them to a plan, they can change most any part of it via email and they can navigate to the page to view all of the details.

    Everyone else - international support is coming shortly. Take a look at our FAQ or our Blog for more info.

  11. Adam Moore

    March 9th, 2006 at 2:31 am

    Hey there!

    Noam - looked at FAQ and blog - appreciate that international is difficult - it would be good if you could suggest a fake zip all of us international people could use so that we could be managed and identified when international goes live?

    Loving the idea by the way!

    Michael - shame on you for usng a misleading example! :O

    Hello fellow internationalistas! I’m using the white house zip (20500) until full features are implemented or until Noam gives us another suggestion - soon we will dominate their tea evenings! :D

  12. dinis

    March 9th, 2006 at 2:42 am

    yeah, why the skype-like font?

  13. Robin Blandford

    March 9th, 2006 at 3:12 am

    Ha Funny! A ‘Skobee’ or ‘Skobe’ in Ireland is a term for a scumbag/knacker/chav/scanger if that makes sense to you in the US? Wikipedia will explain! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanger

  14. Ivan Pope

    March 9th, 2006 at 3:53 am

    What I’d really really love to see for all these sort of sites is a built in connection with my existing address book. I really can’t be bothered in this day and age to go hunting for email addresses and enter them one by one. How many different applications do I have to build address books in?
    Or, here’s an application idea: build a web based app that keeps track of your local email addresses and build an API that lets new applications access it. Or is that too dumb?

  15. Jan

    March 9th, 2006 at 4:07 am

    I just love Ivans idea…
    anyway, registered to skobee a couple of days ago and have yet to use it, the zip thing is really frustrating and the adressbook issue too

  16. Noam Lovinsky

    March 9th, 2006 at 4:26 am

    Ivan - You mean something like this?
    http://www.plaxo.com/api

  17. razorshine

    March 9th, 2006 at 4:31 am

    so is Scoble involved somehow? or is it a homage?

    Also take a look at http://www.evite.com

  18. Marcus

    March 9th, 2006 at 5:04 am

    The site looks great and the concept is intriguing, but being married and not in NYC or Silicon Valley where apparently everyone is tech savvy, I just can’t imagine this being useful to me, or really anyone I know.

    Even at the computer company I work at, it seems like a stretch for people to log on to a social calendar on the Internet to plan their weekend rather than using their mobile phones to just call or text their friends.

  19. Shrikant Joshi

    March 9th, 2006 at 5:08 am

    And how is this different from any Groups (Yahoo!, Google, etc. Or Orkut even…)? Aggregation? One Page for every event?

    Or is that *exactly* what is so sifferent about the entire thing?

    Adam, I mean no offense, but please accept my dissent as a critique and not a taunt.

    Regards,
    Shri.

  20. Conor O'Neill

    March 9th, 2006 at 5:38 am

    Would rock even more if it scraped Structured Blogging events from my Blog that are in the hCalendar microformat.

    I wonder how many people they have living in 90210?

    Would be nice if they could handle apostrophes in peoples names. The SQL for it isn’t that hard.

  21. Jeff Barson, Nimble

    March 9th, 2006 at 7:09 am

    I wish linked-in would add this feature. I’ve been going through my contacts manually for each event.

  22. earthling

    March 9th, 2006 at 8:09 am

    It’s a neat idea, but to me it’s a feature and not a product. It belongs as an added feature of an already-established and thought-out UI. Is this the way new features have to incubate in the web 2.0 world?

  23. CB

    March 9th, 2006 at 8:59 am

    Although I haven’t tried it yet ( so I may answer my own question) but how is this different from evite.com?

  24. Bart Claeys

    March 9th, 2006 at 9:00 am

    Yet again an American company that doesn’t think globally! I don’t live in the States, am I welcome to join? Seems not… What sense does it make to enter a zipcode if the country is not asked?? On top of that some zipcodes are only 4 characters, like mine! Anyway, I’ll have to cheat on the zipcode again. When are they finally gonna learn there is also Europe, Asia and Africa on this globe?

  25. Bradley Twohig

    March 9th, 2006 at 9:05 am

    I second the how is it different than evite. It sounds like a feature model not a business model.

  26. Mick Jones

    March 9th, 2006 at 9:14 am

    WOW, this is the most impressive product ever created!!! I bet it must have taken at least two weeks to develop.

    Hey Michael, how about some reviews of some serious products for a change instead 3 page websites with one or two tiny options?

  27. Matt

    March 9th, 2006 at 9:29 am

    Come on now Mick, what they built isn’t trivial. It seems like the purpose is the same as Evite, it’s just a more natural (or so it seems, haven’t used it yet) implementation.

    I look forward to trying this, hopefully the cool imlpementation is actually useful - sometimes fancy is better, sometimes its not. I’m curious, how closed in the language set?

  28. Michael Arrington

    March 9th, 2006 at 9:58 am

    #14 - Ivan - great idea. it was a pain for me to look up the emails for the event i was creating, and i invited less people because of it.

    #28 - Mick - I’m betting you aren’t a developer based on your comment. Stuff like this isn’t trivial to built at all…and by the way, sometimes the best ideas aren’t hard to build, they are just killer business models.

  29. Michael Arrington

    March 9th, 2006 at 10:00 am

    #16 - Noam - you must never, NEVER, integrate with plaxo’s api. that’s a sure way to kill any scrap of goodwill you have built up. I am dead serious here.

  30. Zoli Erdos

    March 9th, 2006 at 10:30 am

    Skobee = Evite 2.0. A Web 2.0 Recipe

  31. Joseph Malik

    March 9th, 2006 at 10:33 am

    “…and by the way, sometimes the best ideas aren’t hard to build, they are just killer business models.”

    And what is Skobee’s killer business model?

  32. Ewan

    March 9th, 2006 at 10:40 am

    Echoing Bart’s comment above, I just took Michael’s suggestion and decided to try out Skobee.

    Really, really, really annoying that their silly zipcode logic doesn’t allow international alphanumeric ‘postcodes’.

    Ergo I haven’t managed to sign up yet. It’s that or stick in 10010 and pretend I’m a New Yorker.

  33. Axel Wolf

    March 9th, 2006 at 12:06 pm

    What’s a ZIP? We only have postcodes in the UK… But it doesn’t ask for my “state” so there’s still hope.

    Seriously, though, if you want to get things going like the upcoming european “Convention for Really Amazing and Progressive Startpages” wouldn’t it be better to simply set a date and location and that’s it? Otherwise you’ll have everyone invited (and her Grandma) discuss the details for ages.

  34. Axel Wolf

    March 9th, 2006 at 12:13 pm

    Having thought about the ZIP issue I would suggest that everyone from outside the US uses 07601 - that’s Hackensack, New Jersey. That’ll teach’em!

  35. isbo

    March 9th, 2006 at 12:30 pm

    I had a similar idea sometime back: an event RSVP website with some community features like discussion board, “event” pictures, venue maps, etc. No need to make people register - they just get a link in the email from the organizer. Although they can register if they want to.

    The problem with Skobee’s approach is that scheduling a big event with lots of participants and a large set of timing constraints is almost impossible.

    Just give me a facility of scheduling a small meeting based on everybody’s availability in the calendar and I would be happy. But Oh wait, Google calendar will most likely do it anyway.

  36. Jacknut

    March 9th, 2006 at 12:52 pm

    Wow.. this was cool back when it was called eVite.

  37. Al

    March 9th, 2006 at 1:07 pm

    That looks pretty cool.

    PS where’s my skobee invite for the London event?

    regards
    Al

  38. susanne johnson

    March 9th, 2006 at 2:27 pm

    how is this different from evite?
    esp. since evite has a voter function, poll options, customization and comment dialogue? and wow, even a map too. seems like a lame copy to me, but hey, what do i know? i’m just an event organizer.

  39. Josh Williams

    March 9th, 2006 at 2:48 pm

    Don’t pass judgement until you’ve used the app. Many of you seem to think that its missing functionality. I can assure you, it’s all there. Give it a try, I believe you’ll be impressed.

    In the interest of full-disclosure, my company did the UI, but the gem is the app itself.

  40. susanne johnson

    March 9th, 2006 at 4:50 pm

    I did try it…
    Have YOU tried evite lately?

  41. Michael Arrington

    March 9th, 2006 at 4:56 pm

    Susanne, why are you so angry?

  42. Kenn Christ

    March 9th, 2006 at 5:05 pm

    how is this different from evite?

    They won’t spam you and all your friends?

    Seriously, have you read Evite’s privacy policy lately?

  43. Saul Weiner

    March 9th, 2006 at 5:07 pm

    I certainly hope that skobee is better than eventful which forces people to have a username to reply to an event (even if they were invited.) The basics are so important here.

  44. Jacknut

    March 10th, 2006 at 10:48 am

    WRT to spam from eVite… I’ve never received an unsolicited E-mail from eVite. I suppose they may sell my name to someone else. I figure it’s only a matter of time before this outfit, Skobe, kobe, Scooby, whatever, decides to do the same because some VC or Wall St. analyst is breathing down their neck for numbers. Is it the book of Ecclesiates(sp?) that comments that there is nothing new under the sun?

  45. Robin

    March 11th, 2006 at 4:19 pm

    Interesting idea, but I’m very wary about any site/application/whatever that wants your friends email addresses. Just another way for someone to ‘harvest’ email addresses?

  46. Michael

    March 12th, 2006 at 2:43 pm

    There is a design and usability review for this site in - http://indesignwetrust.typepad.com/

  47. Mike

    March 14th, 2006 at 11:17 pm

    It’s now international, no need for a zip code anymore (even if you typed a fake one you can still go back and remove it now)

  48. Peter

    August 9th, 2006 at 11:05 am

    This seems obvious to me, but folks want to be able to customize the look of their scheduling site - could it really be that difficult? eVite lets you do it to a certain extent - that’s huge. people having a semi-serious meetup, for instance, don’t want to have a happy-birthday-childrens-balloons background, and vice-versa.

    That’s where Google’s going while nobody’s looking. Calendar is the base. Add what they’ve learned with their home page creator - together, you get evite + renkoo + etc - all on crack.

  49. Tresor alarmanlage aus Berlin mitte Lichtenberg Schlüssel Notdienst und Sicherheitstechnik

    January 23rd, 2007 at 3:54 pm

    It’s a neat idea, but to me it’s a feature and not a product. It belongs as an added feature of an already-established and thought-out UI. Is this the way new features have to incubate in the web 2.0 world?

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