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!

Have you still not uploaded a profile picture for your Anyvite account?  Is your picture still a grey silhouette?

Well no more.   Anyvite now provides a collection of avatars for you to choose from for your profile picture, ranging from human beings to animals and dinosaurs. Simply go to “settings” and “profile picture” to view all of the possible avatars.

Finally say goodbye to boring profile pictures!

At Anyvite, we constantly strive to create a better experience for the event creator and invited guests.  One way we’re doing this is by automatically populating new user and invited guest profiles with information from sites like Flickr and Twitter.  The end result is an invitation with a guest list where you can actually tell who’s coming, and enjoy looking through the pictures.

We hope to add additional social sites in the near future for even more guest profile info, so definitely keep checking back!

Since we launched, Anyvite has supported the ability to “try before you buy”, where you can use the service to create an event and customize to your liking, before registering and sending out the invitations.  As we added in additional features throughout the month of July, the “try it” portion of the service was often neglected, due mainly to some complications which arose in replicating the internal functionality for non-registered users.  We’ve spent the past few days completely reworking the code so that the “try it” portion uses the same code base as the “create event” functionality, which registered users are privy to.

What does this mean for you?  Basically, the invitations that you can create while not being registered or logged in to the service are significantly better than they were yesterday.  You can add in a main picture to your invite, either by uploading one of your own or searching Flickr through our site, as well as upload additional supporting pictures or link to YouTube videos.  You’re also able to add in a profile picture and display name before sending out invitations to your invited guests.

There are a ton of tweaks and new features spread throughout the “try it” process now, so explore it and let us know what you think!