This past week we’ve made some great updates to Anyvite that should drastically improve of speed of the site when interacting with large invitations.  The biggest change comes from a change to how we send notifications.  Instead of making you wait for invitations to be sent, resulting in long page load times, we now send them separately so things that used to take a while like inviting a bunch of friends or launching the invitation should now be snappy! 

The other change will benefit the Invitation organizers of larger events.  In the past, the ability to change guest’s RSVPs was done in the guest list which meant we were always constrained on space and it was a bit heavy to download.  We switched this to a modal box so we have a bit more room to work with and we can load everything dynamically making the page smaller so it works better in slower browsers (cough IE cough cough…I must have come down with something).

What else would you like to see?  We’ve got a long list, but keep the feedback coming!  And check out the great themes we have for upcoming occasions like Super Bowl® parties, Valentine’s Day invitations, and St. Patrick’s Day events!

One area that we’ve been meaning to improve for a long time now has been the dashboard. The aim was always to provide significantly more information on the dashboard than just invitations, so that a user could have a grasp on where they stood with their entire Anyvite account in just one glance. Unfortunately, up until now, other areas have received our attention, but we were finally able to squeeze in a window of time to take another swing at the dashboard.

The new Anyvite dashboard is still centered around your invitations, but now also displays the contacts in your address book, groups which you’re a member of, current weather and forecast for the coming days (very helpful for events taking place outdoors), and popular invitation designs. In addition, we’ve made it easier for newly registered users, who don’t have any invitations, to get started on the creation process right from the dashboard.

We still have a lot of things that we want to improve and add to the dashboard, but figured this little tune-up was a good start on that improvement process. Keep an eye out for incremental tweaks and additions going forward, and please send us feedback as to what you like and don’t like with the new setup!

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!