I noticed that evite has updated their interface while I was sending out an evite this afternoon for our weekly volleyball game.

I like it that they are constantly updating their site and not resting on their laurels. Here are my first impressions on the new updates.

What have they done?

• The interface now sports a (bright green with red edges) book layout which opens up (nice animation) to the first page which is the invitation details and a big button to reply. but, once the book opens the interface thankfully (to our eyes) turns grey.
• The left side of the page sports an ad. This is when it got interesting. May be it’s just me but it took me a while to figure how to go to the next page!
• It is intuitive in hindsight but the buttons to turn the page are close to invisible! There is a half-an-inch wide bar on the side with 2 buttons which can find if you mouse over the area that are used to scroll between the pages. (ajaxified ?) It renders the same in IE and Firefox as a grey bar in the side.
• Next page has the Guest List with all the usual options laid at the top horizontally. It can be annoying to scroll down the small area in the reduced-useable-real estate interface if your guest list is long!
• The last page sports a cool ‘Drink Calculator’ and other host tools. You can see how much I would need for my friends..

Evite must certainly feel the pressue from the web 2.0 startups that are sprouting up and some of them gaining ground. Some notable ones are Socializr, MyPuchbowl, Planypus, Renkoo and SetDot (beta). It is evident that they are nervous from their threat to sue Socializr over some template designs.

I have my sights trained on SetDot as that comes close to my needs for an evite alternative. A lightweight, no-frills event planner with an ajax interface. I haven’t used it yet because it requires you to be registered in SetDot to respond and I am going to play with it more before I send it out to a large group of people. (who might not even have heard about it yet)

Do you like evite? Or are you actively looking for an alternative.

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