The simplest offering of the bunch by far is http://whichweekend.com – although it’s only useful for organising which weekend people are free!

I’m a believer in starting with the bare minimum required to implement a useful idea. Some of the startups on the scene seem to try to do too much before their launch – probably to justify the investment – whereas a quick dirty launch with incremental updates would probably result in a better end result.

Good luck on the next venture Jim.

Its a simple and powerful tool!

Definitely a shame that ikordo has gone, and a depressing one for the UK start-up scene. It seemed to reflect a geniune need (although definitely needed distribution through enterprise channels to get traction), as anybody who regularly needs to herd cats to get a load of people in a meeting room (particularly when you’re from different companies, and the different companies use different calendaring tools so that there’s no compatability around invites received, i.e. Outlook/Lotus Notes) will attest.

Agreed with Danvers that the key to this one (for ikordo, and for plenty of other social services) is integration with email. ikordo did have a beta Outlook plug-in (this page is still live on their site at time of writing http://www.ikordo.com/about_outlook.cfm – check out the Google cache if this has gone, search for ikordo outlook), and looks like there was a gmail plug-in in the pipeline.

So they were doing the inbox integration. I definitely think we’ll be seeing more integration of 3rd party social (and productivity) services in the email client/service, so that you can leverage your persistent social network (i.e. your email address book) and have very convenient access to these 3rd party services (via a plug-in) in a place that really makes sense and that gets used a lot (i.e. you don’t need to remember to go off somewhere else to use the service).

Xobni’s obviously doing good stuff in relation to making Outlook a more intelligent experience via their plug-in (making sense of your emailing activity; Bill Gates talked about this being the future of social networking), and people like rememberthemilk have created a great gmail integration for their to-do list service. So I definitely expect to see more services doing such integrations (whether they’re trying to improve the email experience or to leverage the address book so that users don’t have to create a version of their social network again on a new service), and also with IM where the target user community is more IM-centric. Interesting area as a whole (particularly when also thinking about the whole data portability angle, and as the social networks, whether LinkedIn or Facebook et al, develop their messaging/collaboration propositions – ikordo could have been a nice service on the new LinkedIn platform, thinking about it).

Anyway, shame to see ikordo go, and a bit baffling considering that they weren’t a speculative 2-man start-up, had a vc behind them already, had been at Demo only recently (so weren’t just operating in the UK), seemed to be solving a real-world problem and were doing it in an integrated way (i.e. in the context of the inbox). Don’t know how well the service worked, or if distribution was problematic (e.g. was there enterprise traction, were Microsoft/others playing ball?). Seems strange that nobody stumped up more cash (or even a tactical purchase by one of the email providers, whether Microsoft or other).

PS I’m looking into email integration of services, hence my apparent obsessive interest in this!

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(Er war ein Superstar, er war Popular)