Comments on: Best Party Ever: Party Planning for Web 2.0

By: Jason Ayers

Jason Ayers — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 04:39:26 +0000

“What’s Your Party?” is the main interface to the site. Tell it your event type and city, you get back lots of results in categories relevant to your event type. The more users who choose a vendor (and automatically the associated category) and build a list, the more an event type in an area becomes relevant.

It’s a user-driven catalog that will emerge to be extraordinary once they get past the UI hang-ups. The changes they made just today look promising.

By: Paid Reviews, Keep it Real Yo! at Baron VC

Paid Reviews, Keep it Real Yo! at Baron VC — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 13:42:15 +0000

[...] Here’s another good illustration of why I think paid blog reviews are going to die out on their own. Basically, paid reviews are in a conundrum. If you pay bloggers to review, the big-time bloggers with an established audience are going to end up being harsher on you. [...]

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 09:58:34 +0000

Wow, an Ajax fest and a screen cast. How “2.0″ can you get.

I must be really boring or a loner because I really don’t plan that many parties that I would ever need more than paper an a pencil. The difficulty tends to be getting a date that all the people I want to see can make.

Is there a shared calendar that guests could log onto (after receiving a invite email) to see possible available dates…

Anyway, good article.

By: Scrivs

Scrivs — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 06:37:14 +0000

Sure my ReviewMe account should still be open by then ;)

By: Joshua Strebel

Joshua Strebel — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 05:00:33 +0000

Hey Scrivs,

Thanks for the honest feedback. BestPartyEver.com is an internal project here at obuweb.com, and we see it as a never ending public beta. Truth be told we mashed together the the party planning center interface to debut at a special events convention in LA last week. Much work needs to be done yet.

Lots of kinks to work through and we are aware of a bunch of them. Promise to give another review in a month or 3 when we are farther along, and I wont ask for my reviewme.com fee back :)

Regards,
Joshua Strebel

By: Scrivs

Scrivs — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 04:50:17 +0000

I see where my first mistake is, in that you have to enter the location at the very top of the site, but that gets lost to me because I just see it as a header. Admittedly that is my mistake, but a better location for it would do wonders. A search for Tampa vendors did pull up ones in my area.

By: msmith

msmith — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 04:42:20 +0000

Scrivs,

Try
http://bestpartyever.com/search/Miami,%20FL/20miles/Corporate%20Event?

Assuming you are in Miami for your 9rulesparty

By: Scrivs

Scrivs — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 04:19:07 +0000

Well the good thing I will have to say is that all of the issues I have are fixable. It’s just I’d rather not have seen them in the first place.

By: Mick

Mick — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 03:56:32 +0000

Good article as always. I’d have to agree about the video. Not enough happened in the first 30 seconds to excite me and make me want to keep watching it.

Also just displaying a video and not having a ‘Sign Up Now’ or something to get started quickly didn’t feel very inviting and made me lose interest very quickly.

I can see this being a good idea and very useful in planning a variety of parties and events. Also it looks like they’ve tried to make it a ‘fun’ looking site, because that’s what parties are about. Just don’t know about the functionality and building the hype side of it.

By: msmith

msmith — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 03:37:34 +0000

Wow, Did the coders of that site date and cheat on your sister or something?

You make some good points. The usability is not great, and video is soooo looong. But I did like the overall flow of the site. It was easy to search for to people hire for a party. I typed in “Birthday Party” in Anahiem, CA and got a real nice set of results.

I guess they should have used the BETA label as that seems to be a get out of jail free card for coders to push less than perfect code live.