More Contacts, less SPAM, and a new Homepage!

We’ve got some more exciting new features to tell you about! Our last post introduced importing your evite contacts into Anyvite. We’ve heard from a number of users both on the site and in twitter (here’s a good one) and we thank you for all of the positive feedback!

Continuing on the Contacts theme, we just rolled out a new Contacts Importer for the three main webmail clients: Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Windows Live Hotmail. With our new importer, we’re taking advantage of some new interfaces that these services provide which results in a more secure transaction. So from now on you’ll never have to give us your password to these three services!

You can try the new importer by clicking on the yellow “Import Email Contacts” button on any address book page. Try it out by creating a new event!

We also still have the Plaxo widget which you can use to import contacts from other services and file formats until we’re able to support them all natively. To access it, click the long box across the bottom of the window with the AOL, Outlook (Express), and Plaxo icons.

On another note, we’ve started to attract enough attention that even the spammers have begun to take notice. We’re serious about spam and having it delivered through our service (via fake events) is unacceptable. So, we’ve started taking measures to prevent SPAM events from being created in Anyvite. The steps we’ve taken are just a start and our goal is to remain ahead of the spammers and protect our users. Hopefully, it’s something you’ll never even notice is there, but we want you to know we’re working hard to make Anyvite the best invitation service available.

And on a lighter note, we’ve also updated the Anyvite Homepage. The new homepage has multiple images that rotate through each time the page is reloaded so try refreshing and see if you can guess the holiday! We also rotate through some of our favorite Anyvite tweets which we thought would be a bit better than boring user testimonials. If you’d like us to add your tweet to the homepage, just send it out to your friends. If it’s one of the best Anyvite tweets ever, we might put it up there!

Thanks again to everyone who has tried Anyvite and sent us feedback. It’s been a great September with a new record number of visitors and a record number of events created in one month! Keep up the good work and let us know what we can do to make your invitations more enjoyable!

Import Contacts from Evite!

It’s been a few days since we last posted but we’ve been hard at work and just pushed out a great feature that we’re really excited to share. For anyone who used Evite in the past and has realized there’s a better way, you can now import your Evite address book directly into Anyvite making it even easier to switch!

To try it out, first create a new invitation for your next get together (now is as good a time as any to get everyone together!). After filling out the invitation name and any other details, scroll down to the Add Friends box and click on the green Import Evite Contacts button!

Next, enter the email address and password that you use to login to Evite. We won’t save it, we just need it once so we can retrieve your Address Book. Clicking Get Evite Contacts will take you to the next step of picking the contacts you would like to add to Anyvite. Getting your contacts can take anywhere from a few seconds to a whole minute so be patient!

In the last step, we’ll list all of your contacts and you can choose which ones you would like us to save. Use the handy Select All link to easily choose everyone or just check the boxes next to the contacts you want and click the Next button. That will close this window and add all of the addresses to the Email Address box on the invitation page. To finish, just click on the Preview Your Event button and we’ll take care of the rest!

Evite unfortunately doesn’t make it easy for anyone, including you and I, to get contacts off of their site. This means that there may be a few bumps along the way as Evite changes their site, but we’ll do everything we can to keep this great feature up and running. We feel that it’s your information and you should be able to access it however and wherever you want!

We’ve also added a few other things to the site in the past week. You can now copy invitations and use them as a base for creating new invitations! This reduces the work of filling out all of the fields, inviting the right guests, and adding pictures and other media. We’ve also fixed some bugs and updates all over the site so explore and see what you can find!

We’ve also been working on a feature that we haven’t publicly released yet. We’re testing with a limited number of beta testers to refine some of the features and while it’s still early, we’re excited about this one also!

If you have any questions about any of the things we discussed or if you just have some feedback on how we can improve Anyvite, just use the feedback tab on the site to let us know. Or, you can always leave a comment here or email us if you’d prefer!

Thanks as always for using Anyvite!