Chicago-based Planypus will officially launch their site on November 6th, but all the features appear to be live now. Intended as a place to share event plans, Planypus provides a broadly similar service to HeyLetsGo, ILCU, Eventful and MingleNow's "Myspace for events". Planypus is focused more squarely on arranging events with a select number of friends, but I found it seriously lacking.
The basic idea is this: you post a headline and description for your plans, suggest a preferred time and place and invite some friends to join you. You can also add some tags to make the event easier to find. What's more, there's a groups feature that lets members share plans privately with a group of people. They've added multiple ways to manage these plans: you can add them to iCal or Google or subscribe via RSS, personal homepages, email and SMS text messaging - instant messaging notifications are coming soon. Some events are shared publicly, too, like "Hot Events in Chicago" and "Cool Restaurants in Your Area".
That said, I'm not all that impressed. The design is poor, but that's forgivable if you have a great idea, neat features and a compelling product. I'm not sure they have any of those. We can probably explain this away by pointing out that it's still early days for this company, but they'll need some massive improvements if they're going to get any traction at all.
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