MyPunchbowl has once again made headlines with a minor feature release. Never underestimate the power of a good PR team to make up for lag in engineering.

Today they have launched Buzz, basically a simple feed of what’s happening in the parties you’re planning. While they plan to release SMS and RSS support later, Planypus has had all these things for over a year (and probably closer to 18 months). The “Web 2.0” circus continues…with techcrunch writing a story on every minor feature release the punchbowlers put out. Well the more power to them, at least someone is making money on this silliness

Here they are..the punchbowl feature, followed by the planypus equivalent.

I cannot express how much I am impressed with the quality of work and working style of our new interaction designer: Luciano Pouzada. Having gone through failed projects with three other designers, we finally found someone who not only understands design, but has great communication skills and understands that design is really based on communication!

If you’ve clicked through to Luciano’s page, you may realize he’s located in Brazil. But working with Luciano has made me feel like he’s sitting in the office next door. He’s always online asking and answering questions, and always communicating up front about his status, or if he’s going to be late on a delivery. If you ask me, I’d pick Luciano any day over any local candidates (in fact, we worked for a while with a local designer who had the habit of not answering emails for days at a time!)

The new Planypus design is now complete and is in the process of being implemented, so stay tuned!

Thank you Luciano!

For more information on how we ended up working with Luciano, check out my article on the lessons we learned about how to work with an interaction desginer.

And now, a sneak peek:

From the nuff-said department: Search planypus on google and you get:

We are the players of the web 2.0 game. However, what does it mean for us to be Web 2.0? I thought web 2.0 was about being honest, open, transparent, just the good ole’ “don’t be evil.” So I want to call out one of our competitors and a company that is only Web 2.0 in image and not in practice. About a week ago Matt Douglas, CEO of Mypunchbowl wrote a Groundhog Day article. In the article he writes:

“Co-hosts: By far, one of the best features of MyPunchbowl is the ability to have co-hosts. I wish every MyPunchbowl user knew about this feature. As far as I know, we’re the only party planning website to offer true co-hosting. I made my wife a co-host and she’s been able to keep track of the guest list and party checklist by logging into her own account. Awesome.”

For the record, that is a complete lie. Mypunchbowl is not the only ones that have co-hosts. They have invented what Planypus, for example, had since inception. So I replied to Matt’s blog. I wanted to explain that fact and set the record straight.

Does Matt publish my comment? No. Why? I don’t know this is not even the first time Matt did not publish my comments. I wanted to give Matt a few days to put up my comment, however it’s no where to be seen. In fact, the only comment on Mypunchbowl is a comment praising them, meaning that they do read comments and moderate them. What are you scared of Matt? I though Web 2.0 was all about being open? Why do you lie to your users, your readers, and are too scared to let them hear the truth.

Go ahead Matt Douglas, reply to my blog, don’t worry, unlike you I will publish your comments.

You asked for it - now you got day-before reminders of upcoming plans. All the information is in the email including the ability to change your rsvp! Plan creators get a special reminder giving them the list of coming guests. We also put in place several updates to our email layout that will make it work with Outlook 2007, and fixed the formatting for text messages to t-mobile and other carriers. Let us know what you think! PS we have a brand new design coming really soon, and VIP users will get a sneak preview next week!

Those of you running websites or blogs that post events will be pleased to know we released a couple new features for our Planypus Link functionality. You can now put in times and locations so that when your users click on the links they’ll get all the information filled in for them and can easily send your events to their friends. Let us know what you think!

The upgrades took just a tad longer, but you should now notice Planypus is much faster at our new datacenter. But we wouldn’t make you suffer through an hour of downtime without some changes.

First of all, we now have a truly WYSIWYG editor for the planspace, meaning you can see exactly what your plan will look like:

But the big theme of this release is Undo. Lots of you came to us and said “but what if my friend fubars my plan?”. Fear no more! Simply click the “show/undo changes” link next to the word Planspace, and you can now see all the changes and go back to any previous version.

We also know how annoying it is when you’ve worked hard to build up some nice things to vote on and someone goes and deletes an option. You can now easily restore it as well as all the voting information by clicking the Show changes link below the voting area:

Those are just some of the visible changes, but we’ve made a lot of internal changes that will make Planypus faster and easier to use! Enjoy responsibly.

We’re moving to a new faster and more secure datacenter as well as releasing some new features. Stay tuned! Since this is a big move we might have as much as half an hour where the site will become inaccessible. Thanks!

My second day of running Leopard, and I am loving it (well besides the somewhat questionable design choices in the translucent menu and dock stack icons). Only today I remembered about a much hyped feature of Leopard – Web Clips. You can now use Safari to clip any piece of a webpage and make it into a Dashboard widget. Why might this be useful? Hmm…how about my Planypus Brewing Plans?

It’s super easy! Just click the little scissor icon on the Safari toolbar, then mouseover the Brewing Plans section until it highlights in white, and click Done. That’s it! Now you’ve got a Dashboard widget with all the recent comments your friends have made. If this doesn’t make you want to go out and buy a Mac, I don’t know what will

CHICAGO — August 22, 2007 — Planypus, a site that lets friends make collaborative plans, announced the closing of its Series-A financing. The round was over-subscribed and funded exclusively by private investors.

The Planypus service is designed around a shared discussion space that allows participants to make plans together. Users are able to suggest and vote on event details, make comments, and invite friends. With the ability to access the service via website ( http://planyp.us), a mobile phone interface, text messaging, calendars, and RSS, even the busiest of people always have a convenient way to stay updated with friends’ gatherings.

Rafe Needleman, Editor at CNet/Webware said, “Planypus looks like a really good solution for setting up a group movie night or a spur-of-the-moment outing.” When asked about the ability to text message plans, Anna, a user who has organized more than 30 events through Planypus, says “I love it! Most of my friends aren’t online once they get off work, but this way they still stay updated.”

“This round of financing will allow us to bring a more robust infrastructure to our customers. We are working hard to improve our user interface and bring exciting, new features to fruition,” said Yan Pritzker, CEO of Planypus.