From the moment that we began building Anyvite, our thought and assumption was always that people creating and viewing invitations would want to be able to see profile pictures of other invited guests.  We’ve held strong to this idea for well over a year now, but as hard-headed as we may be, there have been enough plausible scenarios where adding in the ability to disable profile pictures made sense.  So as of today, invitation creators now have the ability to disable profile pictures from their invitations.  This ultimately turns the guest list from a “3 across” setup to a list view, as shown to the right.

This new functionality can be toggled by going to the “Edit Details” section of the invitation, and expanding the “Additional Options” at the very bottom of the page.  There is an option there for “Show Profile Pictures”.  Simply uncheck the box and save.

As always, we’d love to hear your feedback on the new functionality, and anything else we could do to improve the service.  Keep an eye out for more great updates in the near future!

Slowly we’ve been giving invitation creators more control over what is shown on the invitation. Today we finally added an option for the last major piece (still lots of minor things though!). Invitation creators are now able to hide the comment board on the invitation page for those times when they’d rather not have a big list of people saying why they can or can’t come. Of course, there are times when the commenting really adds to the invitation so only disable it if you don’t want your guests chatting before the event!

We’ve also fixed a some little bugs that were introduced when we did our big update last Friday but overall things should be running pretty smoothly.

St. Patrick’s Day is in two weeks. If you haven’t sent out your St. Patrick’s Day invitations, now’s the time!

After our latest release, which included the new configuration options for Anyvite, we received a lot of feedback about the need to format the actual text of the invitation.  Since then, we’ve been hard at work adding in the functionality for event creators to be able to customize the invitation description to their liking, and as a byproduct of that, we’ve finally given the emails a much needed facelift.

The format of the emails has been improved to take advantage of the newly styled invitation description, as well as to enable guests to easily invite additional people, change their notifications, and view what they’ve currently responded with (yes, no, or maybe).

Take a look when you have a chance and let us know what you think!

We’ve started getting more requests from users asking about ways to display Anyvite events on their own sites and blogs.

We’ve had RSS feeds, but that’s not ideal for displaying your events to the public, so today we want to announce our first step toward being more open.

We’re in the process of testing a widget that you can embed in your website or blog that will show any upcoming open events that you’re hosting or attending. This makes it ideal for groups to list their upcoming events or anyone who attends/hosts events!

One of our first beta testers is Adam Gartenberg. Checkout how he’s using the Anyvite Widget!

We’re still working on finalizing and improving the widget so for now, if you’d like to try it, just send us an email at support@anyvite.com and we’ll send you a link.

Remember that Thanksgiving and the holiday season are fast approaching so get started on your Anyvites soon!

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!

We pushed out an update tonight which allows event creators who are canceling an event to add a custom message to the email notification before it’s sent to all recipients.  This is just a little update, but it saves users from having to send multiple messages to explain the reason for the cancellation.

Let us know what you think!