Two days ago I got an email from “launch”. Well, pretty strange. Who names his child launch? But after opening the email I discovered it was not the name of somebody but an action. A Swiss company from St. Galen launched their first product and sent out some emails and invited people to join their service.
The service I am going to write about is called “togedda!“. What this means should be pretty clear: together and that is also the idea of this website. Bringing people together and exchange activities. On the about page you can read
The Idea
togedda! was initiated as a project after trying to set-up a soccer match with a group of 10 to 12 friends in late summer 2006. Have you ever tried to organize an outdoor activity with 10 or more people by email, phone, and/or SMS, not knowing when your friends will be available and what the weather will be like on that day? And what do you do when there are some indecisive people in the group? After we have experienced the complexity and frustration of organizing group activities several times, we started to develop an idea of ´something´ that was to become togedda! – a simple and fun tool that would both save us time, solve our communication and coordination problems, and find more like-minded people with similar interests that would join our group.
Doesn’t that sound like Web2.0? And I accepted the invitation and created an account. The process was very easy and quick. Only the captcha was hard to read.
The registration asks for the basics such as username, an email and a password and the country you are from. On your profile page you can later add website, blog, ICQ, MSN and phone numbers.
Creating a new event is easy as well. You respond to the questions “What?”, “Where?”, “When?” and “Who?”. In the who-field you can add people from your togedda-contacts or invite people directly via e-mail.
On your personal startpage you have a quick overview of upcoming events, news from togedda, activities you have been invited to and a big green link to create a new activity.
For finding activities there are channels. Every activity that has been created and is public is listed there. You can browse the categories, search on location or by keyword. The location can be narrowed down to states. Maybe they will add city as soon as they have enough traffic and events.
Every activity has its own detail view. As host of the event you can change a lot of things there, like add a PDF file, add a message for others or share images, invite more people and so on. The attendees can confirm or deny their participation and add own stuff to this event. But as soon as an event is over, you only can upload images and create a little gallery. This is a cool feature, but I prefer to have my images on Flickr or my own server and not upload them to togedda. This is a cool feature upcoming has together with Flickr. You just add a special tag (upcoming:event=ID) and the picture shows up on the upcoming site.
Currently the user base is pretty small. I counted around 50 profiles and most of them from Switzerland.
If this service really can compete in the future and if the service improves can only time tell. To check it out yourself go and set up an account for you and play around a little.
FYI: Togedda has just been relaunched, it is well forth a view.