We’ve heard from a couple of sources that Socializr has laid off most or all of the staff and that the site is running on autopilot. The company confirms cost reductions but won’t go into more detail on the scope of the layoffs. From founder Jonathan Abrams:

We are definitely not shutting down our site, or our operations, or the company, but Socializr has taken cost reduction steps to adjust both to the economic conditions and the time required to grow an event invitation service, and we expect these moves to help us get close to cash-flow positive, albeit on a very lean burn-rate, and last a couple of years without needing further capital. Additional details are company confidential, hope you understand.

Abrams is best known for founding Friendster in 2002, one of the first popular social networks. Friendster ultimately lost its pole position in social networking to MySpace, which in turn lost to Facebook. But Friendster created a template for a user profile and friending that is still used by competitors.

Socializr was dubbed “evite 2.0″ when it first launched by various press, but it turns out that it’s probably competitive pressure from Facebook and others that have doomed the service. Evite hasn’t evolved much, but more social invitation products, such as those offered by Facebook, have stolen a lot of new user growth. Socailizr, which never had a huge user base, can’t compete with what is essentially a side feature at the mammoth Facebook.

Compete shows Socializr peaking at 90,000 or so monthly U.S. visitors earlier this summer, which is certainly not enough to sustain a venture backed business. The company raised a total of $2.25 million over two rounds, the latest in 2007.

It doesn’t look like Socializr is shutting down any time soon, but it’s definitely on DeadPool watch. Let’s hope it can find a way to pull out a win, even a small one.

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Real Time is the new black. Everyone’s doing it, or wants to be doing it. Even Google says it’s one of the biggest challenges in search today (making sense of all that real time data).

So it isn’t surprising that people are making fun of it. Jonathan Abrams (who has mocked Incubators of Incubators and Feed aggregators, now goes after Real Time with FutureFeed, which “answers the simple question: What will you be doing?”

“Are you sick of hearing what your friends are doing after the fact?” FutureFeed asks. “FutureFeed tells you what your friends are doing before they do it!”

Like Google Future Search, this is a joke. And it’s a good one, at least for those of us who’ve jumped on the Real Time bandwagon and haven’t looked back. Enjoy.

When he’s not mocking the Internet, Jonathan builds a real startup at Socializr.

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Socializr, an Evite competitor that allows users to coordinate party planning and invitations, is launching a new product today called ‘Event Connect’ that allows users to aggregate and respond to all of their events from sites like Facebook, Meetup, MySpace, and Evite in one place.

The site has integrated with each of these social networks/event sites using services like Facebook Connect, allowing users to see available events that they’ve been invited to, as well as the events their friends are attending. Each of the sites that Socializr taps into has different degrees of support when it comes to friends and photo sharing, so some options won’t always be available.

Because the site can showcase both the events you’re attending and those being attended by your friends, things can get crowded quickly. So Event Connect also features a number of filters, allowing you to specify at what thresholds you’d like an event to appear on your radar (for example, I can specify that I only want to view events being attended by five or more of my friends). Event Connect can also pull photos from multiple sources, like Flickr and Picasa, and display them side by side. Finally, the service makes it easy to send invitations to an event across multiple social networks, like Facebook and MySpace, at the same time.

Socializr’s Event Connect sounds like a solid idea, especially for users who have their event invitations scattered across a half dozen social networks and Evite-like services. But it’s still another pseudo-social network that I’ll have to keep tabs on – I’d much rather get a weekly digest in my inbox letting me know which events are coming up rather than have to keep revisiting the site.

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If you like your invite apps dead-simple, check out Mobaganda. You don’t even have to log in. Just click on start, add the name, date & time, and location, and create an event. The site, which is built on the Google App Engine, generates a Webpage that you can e-mail out to all of your friends.

Once the recipients go to the URL they can RSVP, and you can keep track via RSS or by checking back at the unique URL, which lasts for 30 days. (One downside is that no two events can share the same name during that time period).

Here’s an invite page I made in about a minute for a fake TechCrunch party:

The site generates an e-mail address that can be used to contact everyone on the RSVP list. You can also keep track of the RSVPs through Google Reader:

Or as a widget on iGoogle:

Not that we need more ways to invite friends to parties (see Pingg, Socializr, MyPunchbowl, etc.). But Mobaganda does reduce the process to its bare essentials. (The UI sensibility reminds me of Presdo). It got started as a conversation between Web developer Jason Stirman and Twitter founder Evan Williams. the question they were pondering: Would it be possible to create a better Evite, without even requiring a signup or login?”

Stirman is the creator of OhDon’tForget, a Ruby-on-Rails app that lets you send yourself pre-set reminders via text message (Time picked it as one of its 50 Best Websites last year). Stirman plans on adding text reminders to Mogabanda using OhDon’tForget (when you RSVP, you will be able to add a cell number to get a reminder the day before the event). he is also thinking of ways to add notes, maps, and other features. But he wants to keep it as simple as possible. After all, it is supposed to be the anti-Evite.

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No one knows much about what German startup Popula is building. But German tech blogs can’t stop writing about their pre-launch video marketing gimmick.

The Popula home page says (in German) only “Popula is an event calendar of all for all. Whether party, concert or children’s birthday. Here you will find what you are interested. Register now and test!” People who’ve email them for more information hear nothing back. All visitors can do is enter their email address and wait for more information. Or, they can read the Popula blog, which has just three entries.

Two of those three are the videos linked above, titled The Early Adopter Song! (Part 1) and The Early Adopter Song! (Part 2), featuring songs about early adopters and beta testers, along with images of bloggers, entrepreneurs and other people in the startup community.

German bloggers can’t stop posting the videos and speculating about what the service might be. And all those links are creating enough buzz and driving enough traffic to the unlaunched site that it’s almost as large as some competitive startups (Alexa thinks it has a larger reach than Socializr, for example). And since the company won’t respond to email inquiries, the speculation grows.

Would the same gimmick work in the U.S.? No – people might think it was entertaining but it likely would be drowned out in the noise of startup news (I think it would have worked in 2005 though). But in Germany, a which has a much smaller tech startup community and an odd taste when it comes to entertainment, it seems to have hit a nerve.

Thanks to Jessica Neuhaus for the tip.

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So there’s still room for the killer event site, and startups keep trying. A couple of weeks ago we wrote about MadeIt, a new site that not only allows users to create new events but also to add content before and after. Like the others, though, it centers on the invitation to an event and whether you are going or not.

St. Louis based IMThere, which I discovered on TechnicallySpeaking, is a little different, and joins MadeIt as the most recent startups to try to crack the event nut. IMThere is focused less on getting invitations to events out to friends and talking them into accepting. Instead, it allows users to upload events, focusing less on the private invitation stuff (parties, dinners, etc.). Instead, the site’s early content is mostly about public events like concerts, video game releases, TV premiers, movie releases, etc.

Other users can then add their own content, ranging from comments about the event to uploading pictures from mobile phones during the event itself.

The resulting content is more interesting to the public than those private dinner parties. And top level navigation allows browsing by person, venue, artist, etc. So you can see all the events your friends participated in, see all the past and future concerts at a local venue, and see all past and future album releases and concerts by a particular artist. Users can also search events by popularity, region, etc.

The result seems to be a compelling user experience that could result in real local communities springing up and interacting around stuff that’s happening around them. Mobile interaction is excellent, so heavy users will be accessing it from all of their devices regularly.

See the demo/overview video here. There’s no guarantee IMThere won’t be in the deadpool in six months, but if they can quickly grow a core set of passionate users, they could have a nice property on their hands. IMThere is the first project from parent company Ramped Media.

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From what I’m seeing it isn’t nearly as interesting as Skobee or Renkoo in terms of setting up events. This could just end up being one more social network to sign up for…