Punchbowl Acquires Friendster Founder's Party Planning Startup Socializr

Remember Socializr, the party planning and event management site founded by Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams? The site launched in 2006 as the Evite 2.0, but was unfortunately was forced to lay off all of its staff last Fall. It looks like there’s a good end to the story, as start to finish party planning site Punchbowl is announcing this evening that it has acquired Socializr. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Socializr, which raised $2.25 million in total, is similar in function to Punchbowl and coordinated party planning and invitations for consumers. Last year, the startup launched Event Connect, which allowed users to aggregate and respond to all of their events from sites like Facebook, Meetup, MySpace, and Evite in one place.

Matt Douglas, Punchbowl’s founder and CEO, says that his company is acquiring all of the assets, underlying technology, and domains associated with Socializr (he declined to reveal how many active users Socializr currently has). Douglas says that eventually all users will merge together in Punchbowl. He adds that Abrams will not be joining Punchbowl, but that he will “maintain a close relationship” with the party planning startup.

Punchbowl seems to be growing strong, the startup has grown to one million registered users and rebranded from MyPunchbowl. The platform allows users to create beautiful online invitations and track RSVPs. The platform also provides tools that let you find supplies, organize an after party and even set a date, via an algorithm that recommends the best date for your party. The site also allows you to set up gift registries, save-the-dates, message boards, integrate Google Maps’ to display the location, and share comments, photos, and videos. Basically, Punchbowl helps you plan and organize an event from start to finish.

This isn’t the first acquisition for Punchbowl; the startup acquired local vendor listings site I’m In last November.