Capsule has recently launched in order to let you organise your personal events. And it really does a great job! It also uses Facebook contacts in order to make invitations just a little easier, thus ensuring you’re not entirely left using your out-of-date contact list. It could be precisely what you need.

What Does It Do?

Capsule is essentially a simple way for groups of people to communicate around a common event or cause. Members can create a “Capsule”, give it a few details and invite their friends to the Capsule. The Capsule can be used to chat, share photos, video links, text messages or anything relevant to the members of the Capsule.

“In short, Capsule is like an awesome event planning site that married an amazing multi-media scrapbooking and photo-sharing site. They named their baby Capsule.” — Capsule

Reasons To Use Capsule

There are a number of great reasons to try Capsule:

• Sign up is quick, either using a few basic details or a Facebook login. Gravatar photos are automatically found for users who sign-up without Facebook.
• You can invite any friends to a Capsule as long as you either know their email address or are friends with them on Facebook.
• Capsules can be event-based or group-based. That is, you don’t need to specify an event time or location at all. It can just be an easy way to communicate with a bunch of friends.
• Capsule has both Android and iPhone applications to let people communicate with their Capsules before and after events. It’s really easy to send your party photos straight to the capsule for everyone in the capsule to see.
• You can keep track of how you know your associates by clicking on their Capsule profile. You’ll see all the Capsules you’ve participated in together.
• If enabled for the Capsule, it’s possible to send group text messages. You’re given an American phone number you can send text messages to, which will then automatically send to the rest of the Capsule members. Members who don’t have their mobile number listed in Capsule will get an email instead. Also, it’s possible to send the group text from within the Capsule’s web interface.

The Big Selling Points Of Capsule

That is, things Capsule does in a way no-one else really does:

• A Capsule exists whether or not it’s based around an event or a group. It just is.
• It’s possible to send text messages to everyone in a Capsule. So, when you need to let everyone know about that last-minute venue change it’s easy to get the word out.
• You can easily stay in touch with people from past events.

What You Can’t Do With Capsule

Capsule isn’t currently designed for major events and seems content to focus on private gatherings. For instance, you can’t just give a public URL to a Capsule and let anyone sign up to it. This may change in the future, but for now your Capsule are limited to your own contacts.

Since Facebook became popular, many companies have tried to compete in the same space and failed. In the small group and event space, Capsule may have a good chance at succeeding in the long term. It’s definitely worth a shot!

I still love paper (Crane’s Paper is my absolute favorite). But, the simple truth is that most of us can’t afford to buy fancy paper and pay someone to design our good news, too!

In this wedding season, let’s take a look at three awesome sites to get your creative juices flowing so you can put together some elegant, free printable wedding announcements all on your very own.

Planning a wedding is fun because it allows you to design and create your dreamy day.  Attention to detail will set the tone of your event, and that tone is first set by your announcements. Imagine the announcement as the “first impression” of your special day”¦ you want it to look classy, right?

Design Betty

DesignBetty is one of my all-time favorite websites. Not only can you design and print free printable wedding announcements, they also have an assortment of other free printables.

Design Betty ranks at the top of my list because there is no sign up (although you will need to provide an email address to download, as they will send you a back up copy of your design)! You simply choose the template, edit the font, color, and/or image and presto! You are all done!

Simply download the invitation or announcement as a PDF and print it out on nice stock paper.  You can also email the invitations to guests if you want to save paper.

What makes DesignBetty the cream of the crop is the elegance of the designs.  No chintzy graphics.  No blah fonts.  I printed the announcement below on card stock, and it held the same quality as the invitations I had forked out precious gold for when I got married.

There are just tons of layouts and designs to choose from on their site, and being able to customize the invites and make matching thank you cards is awesome!

There are designs for every taste!

And, the best part is that these classic designs are FREE (and come with thank you cards!).

Although you do not have to register with Design Betty, they do ask for your email address so they can send you a copy of your design.  This is really useful because where else could you go back and get your design?

Southworth

Southworth is another excellent place to design free printable wedding announcements.  Even though they (really) want you to print the announcements on their paper (which looks very nice, by the way).  Their site is easy and simple to navigate.

Southworth four nice graphics, modifiable in Microsoft Word.

Hoover Web Design

If you need a one stop resource for every and any kind of template, Hoover Web Design is the absolute best place to park your pixels!  Even though they are a business, they offer so many free goodies that it makes you want to do business with them!

Like Design Betty, they have 5 pages of nice images that aren’t chintzy or lame. They also have a really good resource area for help with wording and suggestions about where to get the best prices on fancy papers.

The invitations print out in Word and you alter the text. There are two graphics to pick from on their site, but they give you links to other places to get graphics. Like Printables, another text-heavy site with all sorts of helpful tips and advice, you will be inspired by the many resources!

The Final Vow

Creating the first impression of your wedding day can be a lot of fun with these resources.  What other resources have you used?

Pond is the latest in social media aggregators, and serves two main purposes. It allows you to cross-publish content to your social networks, while also following content published by your contacts from those same social networks. It currently supports Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and Facebook, with plans to add more services to its list.

Add a social network by clicking on the tab labelled ‘Me‘ and click on ‘Add stuff.’ From there you can link each of your social networks, as well as add links to sites you follow, provided they have an RSS feed.

Once each network has been added, don’t expect to start enjoying Pond’s benefits immediately. The site is a bit of a hit and miss when importing older posts, and so it only starts getting interesting once a few friends have updated their accounts.

Facebook

Through Pond, you can update your Facebook status, and you can also upload photos to your account. Sending photos from Facebook to Pond, at the moment, is a tedious task of uploading one picture at a time.

Your friends’ status updates are included in your timeline, as well as their posted links, photos and videos, and you can comment on (or as Pond puts it ‘reply to‘) these updates. You can watch videos directly from within Pond, although, at first glance, there is no clear distinction between videos, photos and status updates.

Only when you click on ‘open‘ in the bottom-left hand corner of the update, will you be able to see that there is a video or photo posted there.

As is to be expected, there are certain aspects of Facebook that you will not see when browsing through Pond, such as other people’s comments on your friends’ updates, or comments written on your wall.

You can also remove updates, mark them as read (which greys them out) or add them to your favourites. Adding a Facebook status update to your Pond favourites has no effect on Facebook itself, and does not reflect their ‘like’ feature.

Twitter

Pond is an almost completely functional Twitter client. You can read and post updates, shorten URL’s, post replies, retweet (or ‘republish’) and read replies and direct messages. You can’t, however, add a tweet to your Twitter favourites (not to be confused with your Pond favourites), you can’t follow Twitter conversations, and unlike many other Twitter clients, you can’t add images to your tweets.

Flickr

Flickr integration is pretty basic. You can publish photos directly to your Flickr account and add a description. Your Flickr contacts will also be automatically added to your friends list on Pond, and their uploaded photos will be visible in your timeline.

YouTube

Through Pond, you can upload videos directly to YouTube, and add a description. Videos from your subscriptions will show up in your timeline, but your favourites won’t.

Bringing It All Together

If you’re wondering why you should use Pond to manage your social networks – there’s one main incentive. It gives you a unified (if not somewhat limited) experience of all four websites it supports. You can cross-publish status updates to Facebook and Twitter and cross-publish photos to Facebook and Flickr, although support for uploading multiple photos is a must if this feature is to be taken seriously.

You should also be able to cross publish videos to YouTube and Flickr, but that option doesn’t seem to be have appeared just yet. Pond also supports multiple accounts from each service, and makes it very easy to choose which accounts to update simultaneously, with the various services listed underneath the update box.

What makes Pond really cool is the fact that you can merge your friends’ updates from their various services into one page. So if you have a friend who has a Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube account, you can merge all four into one page and follow all of their content right there in Pond,  in the same way you can see all of your own updates on one page:

Merging contacts is simple. Click on the ‘Friends and Sources‘ tab and find the friend whose accounts you would like to merge. Pond currently lacks a much needed search function but you can filter the list by first initials. You will find a separate listing for each of your friends’ accounts on the various social networks.

Click on one icon, and under the contact’s name choose ‘Add to merge box.’

Repeat the process until you have added all their accounts to the merge box – and don’t worry about getting confused – when an account has been added, it’s greyed out.

Once you have all the accounts in there, click on ‘Merge‘ and Pond will do the rest. On your friend’s page, each post will now be clearly labeled, making it clear which site each update came from.

You can also add your friends’ blogs to their Pond page. Click on their icon, and under their name, choose ‘Add source.’ All you need is the link to the blog, and Pond will find the RSS feed for you.

Mobile & Desktop Access

There are several ways you can access Pond when you’re on the go – the simplest of which is using their mobile web version at m.pond.pt. You can publish and read updates, add them to your favourites, access your friend’s individual pages, and reply to their tweets or Facebook status updates. You can also filter content by each social network. Accessing the mobile version on an iPhone is, as is to be expected, pretty slick.

Mobile Apps specific to different kinds of phones are also in various stages of development, adding further capabilities to how you can use the site from your phone, including publishing photos. There are mobile apps currently available for Android and Nokia S60 phones with an iPhone app in the works.

A desktop version of Pond is also in the works for Mac, Linux and Windows users. The desktop experience will reflect the web experience, but will have the added bonus of a simple drag and drop interface, when publishing photos and videos through Pond.

Pond is currently in closed beta, but they’ve been kind enough to give MakeUseOf invites which will go to the first 100 people to ask for them!   If you would like to apply for an invite, just send a nice email to nancy+pondinvites@makeuseof.com .   We’ll update the page here when the 100 invites are gone. If you are one of the lucky ones to snag an invite, please come back after trying Pond out and let us know in the comments what you think!

UPDATE: All 100 invitations have been sent out! To the lucky winners, please let us know what you think of Pond.

No longer. Evite, while improving, isn’t nearly the best at what it does. That title, in my humble opinion, rests squarely in the hands of Anyvite.

Anyvite is a simple, but feature-rich, way to create invitations and bring all your friends together. Anyvite helps you through every step of the event planning, from finding a venue to deciding whether or not your friends can bring friends (and how many). It’s an incredibly detailed application, that you can ignore entirely if all you want to do is send out a simple invitation.

The first thing you do with Anyvite is create your event: give it a name, a location, a date, and some information. You can style your invitation with one of Anyvite’s many themes, or create your own.

Then, start sending out the invitations. You can send the invitations by entering their email addresses, or you can import your address book from your Email or Evite account. You can see who’s RSVP’ed, and even export your guest list to other applications for easier managing. If you want to create an event for anyone and everyone, Anyvite gives you a link to share with people so they can sign up to attend without having to receive an email.

You get to change just about every option of the invite: do you want there to be a “maybe” option? How many attendees are you capping your party at? Want to remind your guests again before the party? You can do all that and more through Anyvite.

If you’re on the receiving end of an invitation, you’ve got tons of options as well. You can receive invitations, updates and reminders by email, text message, or over any Jabber IM (like Google Talk). You can RSVP by texting or IMing “RSVP y” or “RSVP n”, or even text a comment about the event or invitation. There’s even a mobile site ( m.anyvite.com ) that lets you create, manage and view invitations from your cell phone.

There’s a widget that you can embed on your website or blog ““ a cool feature if you’re hosting or attending relevant events. Your events can also be imported directly into your Google or Outlook calendar, making sure you never forget about that sweet party coming up tonight.

Anyvite, believe it or not, is even useful after your party is over. Anyvite provides you with a code that you put in the tags of a Flickr picture or a YouTube video, and anything with that tag shows up on the event page. It’s like its own scrapbook for your parties.

Anyvite is great because you can create an event in 10 seconds or an hour, depending on how specific and complex you want it to be. It’s incredibly simple to use, and great for planning events. The text-messaging integration also makes it perfect for last-second changes and needs for your party.

Next time you’re planning an event, do yourself and your guests a favor: ditch Evite, and stick with Anyvite for all your planning needs.

How do you use the Web to plan things?

Photo Credit : jemsweb

Example time:

Let’s say that I want to sign up for PossiblyShadySite.com but don’t want to give out my real email address, potentially passing it to spammers. Instead, I register with the address

For those who prefer to use their own domain, that option is also available. All messages to my custom address will fall into its own folder in your OtherInbox, where you can read, archive, search, and reply to them in a nice Outlook-style layout.

Note to self…see if “PossiblyShadySite.com” is taken. Now where was I?

You can do this with a seemingly-infinite number of sites.

- save your Amazon receipts in amazon@myusernname.otherinbox.com
- filter your eBay auto-searches into eBay@myusernname.otherinbox.com
- use separate email just for signups, say em>signups@myusernname.otherinbox.com
- etc.

Best part about this is that there are no filters to set up; you do not have to go to the OtherInbox site ahead of time to create the address. For instance, right after signing up (got username makeuseof) I sent myself 3 emails to following addresses:

- test1@makeuseof.otherinbox.com
- test2@makeuseof.otherinbox.com
- test3@makeuseof.otherinbox.com

When I logged in to OtherInbox I saw each of those emails in its own Inbox. Sweet.

In the event that you begin to receive unsolicited mail in a particular inbox, you have the option of hitting the big “Block All” button, which disables that address. You’ll never see mail from them again. The option to turn a disabled inbox back on is there if needed.

Checking multiple sites for your mail is a chore, and OtherInbox seems to understand that. Additional options allow you to auto-forward all incoming mail to another address, or (my favorite) read your messages via RSS.

The same options are available for individual inboxes, along with the vice-versa option, importing an RSS feed to an inbox.

OtherInbox can also import messages from any IMAP account, auto-saving and organizing receipts, coupons, etc. I’m told that there is currently no limit to the amount of messages that can be saved in your OtherInbox account.

Being a beta, it can be prone to the occasional hiccups, but I have no real complaints about the service. I believe that once you have been using OtherInbox for just a few days, you will wonder what you did without it.

I’m also happy to announce that the nice folks at OtherInbox have opened up their beta to the first 100 Make Use Of readers to sign up through this link. You may also follow their Twitter account for the chance to score an invite, or simply to send them feedback.

So why not set up an account and then come back here and let us know what you think? Do you see this as the new weapon against email spam?

Make Use Of has written a lot on email spam but here are a couple of posts you might want to check out

- Get a Grip on eMail Spam Before It Gets A Grip On You
- Quickly Create Temporary Email Addresses with Yopmail.

Enjoy!

While doing my undergraduate studies, sometimes I had to spend hours on creating simple survey forms, hence I know how time consuming and irritating the process can be. Wufoo can help you build good quality online forms, surveys, invitations and etc. It does not end here, service also does a great job at processing and managing forms. You can check out different form examples and have tour though account user interface here and here, respectively. Wufoo provides good all-in-one feature set, letting person not only to create forms but also easily manage and analyze data obtained from it. It is even possible to create complete customer management system.

There are many people who can benefit from this tool considerably. I think it may be especially useful for teachers, students or people involved in a job that requires to carry out regular customer surveys and monitore custumer behaviour. From the wide variety of subscription models available, I assume that the demand for this service exists in many corporate sectors as well. Below I have included excerpt from the Wufoo’s website

Basically, the possibilities are endless, but here’s a short list of things to give you an idea of Wufoo’s versatility:

• Contact Form
• Mailing List
• Survey
• Job Application
• Workshop Registration
• Event Calendar
• Account Management
• Customer Management
• Bug Tracker
• Invitations / RSVP
• Online Orders
• Wedding Planner
• Address Book
• Home Finances
• Classifieds
• Personal Journal
• Quizzes / Tests
• Media Collection

For sign-up you need only email. Service has 5 different pricing options(check here) including free option. Free service option is limited to 3 forms/month, 3 reports/month and 100 entries. This amount should be enough for non-business use. If you need more then that you will need to subscribe to one of the premium accounts priced between $9 to $199/month,depending on the number of forums required.

Another couple of web based companies that offer similar onlne tools are Form Assembly and WyaCracker. If you know any other similar services let me know.