My Punch bowl

We’re having a small party tomorrow night in honor of some cool friends in town and to play XBOX360 on the newly mounted HDTV’s. Maryam and Robert are the cool friends. When I asked Maryam who she wanted me to add to the evite she gave me a list of names and said “Try mypunchbowl.com”

I did. It has some cool features. And, it needs to make some of the basics easier to access.

Cool Features

1.) You can add flicker photo sets (though you really don’t have those until “after” the party, right?)  

2.) It’s easy to choose and change your party name and details.

3.) It has a built in google map

4.) It’s start up is easy to use.

Missing Features that need to be added/changed before I use it again.

1.) Where is the basic list of yes’s and no’s for the party thrower to look at and work with?

2.) Why isn’t it easy to add an email address to the list of “to invite” – I ended up adding an email to the list. I somehow added her and made it look like she was attending – she never received the email or the link. I was afraid to hit “send a message to guests” because I thought everyone would get the message rather than just the newly invited guest.

 3.)  Why when I click “the people” doesn’t it show me a list of the people coming to the party? Instead I have to go to the message board and scroll to see if the people are coming and what they said or to the guests section. I hate to scroll, yes – I’m that lazy.

4.) Who cares about a “party store locator” – I don’t need an invitation site to tell me where to go, I’m throwing the party – I should know where to get the supplies. Is this here to get sponsorship so the site is free?

5.) Photos – when I saw Flickr photos could be added I thought that was cool. Then I thought about it -  in reality once I send an invite and have a party I never go back to the invite. If I want to post photos I do it on flickr or on my blog never back to an invitation site - when the party is over.

Kudos for clean design and a section for exclusive after party invites. (Though I don’t do exclusive after parties -have them or get invited to them - it was fun to think about who wants to get invited to these enough to add this feature to their product. Great for a giggle for me and mine.)

So there you have it. One lonely little review from a sometime blogger who has a hard time learning new tricks. I’m going back to my old tattered favorite email invitation site for now. Evite  I admit I’m a difficult person when it comes to new tech things. I like the ease of use of the old stuff. Okay, I’m stingy with my “learning curve time.” I get settled in my ways like a grumpy grandma and her favorite things. It’s gotta be a pretty snazzy, easy, and going to rock my world to make me change. Have you found anything like that lately?  

UPDATE : There was a few items of interest posted after my thoughts.

1.) I didn’t give the site enough time and effort apparently as I was using the “Save the Date” feature as opposed to the ”full invitation” feature for my party planning.

2.) Robert and Chris wrote about it, then - Jake, Brandon and Maryam wrote about it too.

I’m glad to hear they (mypunchbowl) stopped spamming (whether intentional or not) my friends - check out their new way of doing business and why they did what they did initially and changed their minds about it.  I felt guilty for giving out my friends email addresses without really giving them out. {What happened?}  I invited them to a party and in doing so in advertently “signed” them up for newsletters from MyPunchBowl (uh oh!). Thank you for changing tha practice mypunchbowl! I appreciate it.

I’m willing to give them another go round just for listening, talking, blogging and responding to the opininons of the people I care about. I’ll let them slide for not posting their thoughts here. I too have trouble doing that on a regular basis. ;)  

If you want to read the response to each of my thoughts go to Scoble’s blog (in the comment section) as that’s where they are posted.