Our recently launched Polls feature lets you ask your friends anything you want! But don’t limit it to yes or no questions, there are lots of ways to use Polls to ask people to indicate their preference. From voting on the length of a vacation, to movie showtimes, Polls are a versatile way to quickly get everyone to agree. Check out the screenshot below for how a poll was used to let friends know about a movie showtime!

I’m really happy to report that after seven months of hard work, we’re back and better than ever! The new Planypus is an example of beautiful user-driven design, that really focuses on the goal: to make plans as humanly fast as possible.

Not satisfied with the overcomplicated process of making plans at competing websites, we’ve got it down to one screen, and actually just one field! Type in a title and let your friends fill in the details. It’s that easy. You can have a plan page up in about 10 seconds and let your friends use the planspace wiki, vote on time and locations, create and respond to polls, and chat. And of course you can get notifications on your phone, email, rss, integrate with calendars, and one-click post to Twitter and Facebook!

We wouldn’t be here today without the hard work of the Planypus team, especially Luciano Pouzada, the talented designer who created the interface for the new Planypus. And tons of thanks to our beta users who helped us test the product in its final pre-release stages. Your support has kept us going!

And while all that’s been going on, we launched our new platform website at http://platform.planyp.us to help websites use the Planypus engine to enable social interaction on their events. Get in touch with us and find out how we can create page views and brand loyalty for you!

Now onto world domination in 2009

Here’s a little taste of what’s to come Click on the pic for more!

Our bubbes certainly approve of the Planypus article in this week’s Oy!Chicago.

Laura Brown did an excellent job of telling the Planypus spiel and concisely communicating that Planypus is a “wevite” service that’s easy to use even by a schlemiel like me. If I forget to invite a friend or specify a location, it is easily added by another nebbish.

To be mentioned in the same article as the mensch across town, Jason Fried of 37signals is quite an honor. Reading his book on efficiency, Getting Real, will help you make more gelt, and save enough time to call your poor mother more often.

However only Planypus has the chutzpah to organize your zeit.

Do you run an event blog? Drive users to your events by offering them a plan button that lets them add your event to their calendar and create plans on on Planypus. We now have plugins available for WordPress, Movable Type, and a FeedFlare for your FeedBurner feed. We even offer free co-branding if you contact us. Enjoy, and let us know how we can improve these plugins!

St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland. Moses lead the Hebrews out of Egypt. The planypus dev team has liberated you from being tethered to your computer.

Go to http://m.planyp.us and check your plans, update your plans, but most importantly share your plans.

Leave a comment on how you have used Planypus Mobile or plan on using it, or wish you could have used it the other night when your house had a power outage.

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We apologize for the downtime - our hosting provider engineyard.com has a systemwide outage that took out Planypus. We are working to get it back up as soon as possible. Thanks!

Update: and, we’re back!

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: