Please *Don’t* Come To My Birthday Party Tonight

15May10

(because it’s not mine!)

Many of you might have received an email about a birthday party scheduled for tonight.  Hopefully you’re not planning on coming because the party isn’t mine — it’s actually a humorous misunderstanding caused by an overly aggressive planning web service.

Perhaps you’re familiar with Plancast.com – ’foursquare for the future.’  Well, last week I received a facebook invite to my friend Madeline’s birthday party. The event was titled “My Birthday Extravaganza (i.e. Maddy boops is an old lady).”

When I RSVP’d for the event, Plancast scraped the event and added it to my profile.

Then it e-mail blasted this to all of my friends:

And at some point Plancast also announced the event from my twitter account.

Five different friends emailed me to ask about the event. Some were disappointed they weren’t explicitly invited (“no party invite? i’m hurt”)  Other expressed their regrets that they couldn’t make it.  And some were just confused (“I completely got all the way to adding the party to my calendar in outlook, when i finally realized that it wasn’t your birthday party and you’ve never once been called maddy boops or whatever in my hearing”).

This is partially a result of the confusing name of the event.  But it also caused by Plancast’s lack of focus around who actually planned the event.  In fact, on my Plancast profile page it proudly announced “You planned this!”  This isn’t an issue for large scale public events where the host doesn’t matter, but for private events the system is a little bit broken.

Regardless, I’ll be sure to let you all know when I have my own birthday extravaganza!

(P.S.  Did you notice the awesome picture at the top?  They’re binary candlesticks!! “The only birthday candle you’ll ever need. One candle with 7 wicks that you light depending on your age. Works for birthdays 1 through 127.”)

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Filed under: Uncategorized   |  4 Comments
  • http://viniciusvacanti.com Vinicius Vacanti

    Got the email and was also confused till I looked at it more carefully on plancast. But, the more interesting part of this post is that amazing binary candle.

  • http://www.adambox.org/ adambox

    happy bday, Maddy Boops

  • Mark Hendrickson

    Hey Maddy boops,

    I'm one of the founders of Plancast. Not sure why I didn't see this post until now but glad a friend of mine pointed it out today.

    First off, my apologies for generating so much confusion! This is a use case that has been brought to our attention before for which we need to find a solution, since it appears to be cropping up from time to time. Interestingly, it appears to happen pretty much exclusively for birthday parties…perhaps because they often start with “my” and people get excited about them.

    The central issue, of course, is that the event title on Facebook is used directly for your plan's “what” information on Plancast. This works just fine 99% of the time since event titles are not usually organizer or attendee-centric, but it fails pretty miserably in the case when they are.

    We should do some more analysis and perhaps replace phrases like “My birthday” with “[insert name of actual organizer's] birthday”. It may not be perfect, but it could solve most of the cases.

    Any other suggestions would certainly be welcome!

    BTW, I'm not sure why it tweeted from your account. We're not set up to tweet out Facebook event RSVP imports automatically on behalf of our users.

    Best,
    Mark Hendrickson

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