Today we said goodbye to a feature that has been with us since the beginning.  When Jeff and I were first creating Anyvite (it was called Coordinatr then!) I snuck in a feature I called the ShareSpace.  The idea was you would upload pictures and video to Flickr and YouTube, tag it with some text we gave you and it would then show up on the ShareSpace page of your invitation.  It was a good idea but wasn’t executed to its full potential.  That combined with constant problems with Flickr images not showing up in their public search ment lots of problems.  And since it was one of our least used features, we decided to choose the easy path and remove it entirely.

It may seem strange to some, but I celebrate the removal of a feature just as much as adding a new one.  Most people who haven’t created web or other applications don’t realize that each additional feature compounds the overall complexity of a system.  So the more features you have, the harder it is to make the entire system run well.

But it’s not all bad news!  We also recently added support for Gravatars which means some of your guests will have profile pictures now without ever having to upload their own to Anyvite.  This is especially helpful for technical events since people who comment on blogs are the most likely to have Gravatars setup.  We also simplified the navigation to the Manage Guests page from the invitation.  Since we removed the ShareSpace link, we were able to breakout the “Invite Guests” and “Manage Guest List” pages into two separate links which should make it easier to navigate around the invitation.