I hate evites. Here’s why.
Tonight Maryam and I are going to the Tango Diva book launch party. Everything is hunky dory. Right?
Wrong. The evite email that I have doesn’t have any information on it. It doesn’t tell me where the party is. It doesn’t tell me when it starts. It forces me to click over to the Web site to look at all that info. I really, really hate that (because I drag emails from people to my calendar to keep the date and I hate clicking away from my calendar just to learn pertinent information because the service an inviter used is trying to collect page views by forcing me to visit the site).
So, when I saw MyPunchbowl.com today — founder Matt Douglas was here to show it to Maryam and me — that was one of my first concerns.
It passed the test. The emails that come from MyPunchBowl have all the pertinent information in them.
But that’s not all. It far exceeds evite by including integration with Google Maps for location, Flickr for photos before and after the event, an event-store lookup, and other cool features. Maryam liked the ability to customize emails per invitee (evite doesn’t do that either).
Anyway, it’s going to be hard for MyPunchbowl to compete with evite, because evite is such a strong brand name and has so many users, but I’m cheering it on because it’s superior to evite. Please, if you’re going to invite me to your next party, use MyPunchbowl. My calendar will love you for it.
Scobleizer 