MyPunchblog

Those that live and breathe Web 2.0 know the guys at 37 Signals write a blog about design and simplicity. It’s called “Signal to Noise” and it’s read by tens of thousands of bleeding edge designers and web programmers every day.

37 Signals is a company that does some neat office productivity apps — including Campfire (groupchat) and Basecamp (project management) — both of which we use at Punchbowl Software. The designers at 37 Signals believe in simple web apps that get the job done rather than over-complicated apps that have lots of features. The “Signal to Noise” blog is about simplicity in design, and they seek submissions from the community at large.

A few months ago, I sent them a screenshot of our new theme picker. I didn’t hear anything back from them, so I assumed it fell into the black hole. But just last week, a few of these bleeding edge folks emailed me to let me know that we had been featured on the 37 Signals blog. I don’t expect tons of traffic on our site as a result of this mention, but it is neat to be featured on the cool kids blog. Here’s a screenshot from the blog post (click on the picture to see the actual blog entry):

Thanks to 37 Signals for including MyPunchbowl — it’s nice to have our design work recognized by people “in the know.”

We’re a fan of some of the products from 37signals. We use Campfire for real-time group chat, but we also find Basecamp useful at different times in our development cycle.

When we push a new version of MyPunchbowl “live”, it’s critical that we’re all chatting simultaneously. And for us, this morning was a really unfortunate time for 37Signals to experience downtime. Ah, well. It happens.

We’re really happy with how 37 signals communicated as they were having trouble. We all have down time once in a while. The Punchbowl team thinks they did a great job of communicating and fixing the problem in a timely manner. Bravo to the everyone at 37 signals.

(Oh, and a new version of MyPunchbowl is on its way!)

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Party Planning and Free online invitations at MyPunchbowl.

When we first started this blog forMyPunchbowl, we wrote about our plan for a “managed rollout.” For us, the goal was to roll out MyPunchbowl in stages so that we could have as much 1:1 contact with our users as possible.  We wanted to make sure the features worked really well, and that the UI was as easy to use as possible.

Our managed rollout has gone well- we’ve steadily increased users, fixed alot of issues, and have been able to implement a lot of user-suggested features. We’ve taken the fewer features/simpler approach (37 signals would be proud), and we’ve  improved the product in bite-size increments.

Over the next few days, we’ll be widening the scope of our rollout. We think we’re just about ready now and we’re excited to have even more people try out MyPunchbowl for their next party or event. Yes, we know there are still features users want to see, but we think that less is more. We hope you agree that we’ve created a simple, but powerful app that is fun to use.

We’ll post more info about the next stage of our Managed Rollout soon.