Need a Classier Way to Bum a Ride? Use FriendlyFavor
FriendlyFavor, which was released today, does one thing, and it does it well: manage favors. The service lets you request favors from your friends, and offer favors to your friends. With FriendlyFavor, you can ask your friends for help with your move, or easily offer tickets to a basketball game to all your friends. FriendlyFavor then provides you with a dashboard that lets you manage the responses from your friends, which is a lot easier than trying to keep track of individual emails.
Ask for Favors
FriendlyFavor nicely integrates with your AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, Plaxo, and Outlook address books, so that you can immediately start to ask your friends for help with that big move next weekend without having to establish a new contacts list on FriendlyFavor. Whenever you ask for a favor, FriendlyFavor will send out emails with the details. These details can include pictures, deadlines, information about how to best respond, and other details.
Offer Services
However, while asking for things is definitely a major part of the FriendlyFavor experience, you can also offer your services. Maybe you have some tickets to a ball game this weekend that you can't use and would like to offer to your friends, for example.
Cash or Karma
Of course, not all favors come for free, so FriendlyFavors lets you reward your friends with good karma, but also with electronic gift cards, or a donation to your favorite charity through TisBest.
Overall, FriendlyFavor is is a fun idea, and we really like the fact that you can repay favors with charitable donations. While its focus is on asking for favors, the tool is also quite flexible. There is no reason why you couldn't use it to organize a party or ask your friends if they want to play golf this weekend.
Comments
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Agree that it's an interesting idea. However I think this may go the way of other niche service sites (photo sharing, event planning, etc) with the advent of Myspace and Facebook. Seems like there are other ways to accomplish this within applications that we already use, and with people on the verge of social networking overload it could be hard to convince people to sign up for yet another service.
Perhaps they've considered letting people log in through Facebook Connect or Google Friend Connect, or creating apps to work within the social networks people already belong to.
Just my $.02, based on my own observation of people I'm connected to.