MyPunchblog

A few weeks ago, we launched MyPunchbowl eCard Studio. One of things I love about eCard Studio is that it gives me the ability to use MyPunchbowl for everyday occasions. On an almost daily basis, I find a reason to use MyPunchbowl eCard Studio. Consider a few example from the last week:

• A colleague of mine had some minor surgery, I sent her an ‘get well soon’ eCard
• My sister-in-law celebrated her birthday, I sent her a birthday card through Facebook
• My wife was having a challenging day at work — I sent her a “thinking of you” eCard
• A friend of mine turned 30, I sent him a birthday ecard

Obviously I’m biased, but I find that MyPunchbowl eCards are suitable replacement for traditional paper greeting cards. With a few clicks of a mouse, I can send a thoughtful, personal, and sophisticated greeting card. No run to the stationary store, no stamps required, no post office — and it’s free.

So who in your life are you thinking about today? Why not send them an free eCard from MyPunchbowl?

We’ve been working on a few interesting new features here at MyPunchbowl and I’m happy to be able to tell you about one of them today.

For many of us, the hardest part of planning a significant celebration is having enough time to pull everything together. How many times have you glanced at the calendar to see that the birthday party you were going to plan is only a week away? And how many times have you been surprised that a significant holiday has snuck up on you?

For those of you with a blog, we’ve launched a new feature to help you with this problem: the “MyPunchbowl Celebrations Widget.” Everyone has their own reasons to celebrate, and we’ve developed a handy-dandy widget so you can share your reasons with the world. Add your brothers and sisters birthdays (and your nieces and nephews) and choose which holidays to display too. You can change the theme and the color of the widget to match your blog’s color (and even choose the font). Then simply copy and paste the code to your blog, and you’ll have a personalized celebrations widget.

Here’s a screenshot of MY personalized widget, all customized just for me (if you want to see how this looks on my blog, head over to the MyPunchbowl blog):

If you have a blog, we hope you’ll give the MyPunchbowl Celebrations Widget a try to display your reasons to celebrate to the world. Oh, and stay tuned… we have a widget contest that we’ll be announcing soon.

It’s about 95 degrees in Boston today, so I suppose it’s not a surprise that I started thinking about July 4th.

Every year, my July 4th weekend is accounted for — my wedding anniversary is that weekend and my wife and I usually get away. As a result, I usually have to decline the 4th of July party invitations that I receive. I think last year I was invited to at least two 4th of July parties that we declined.

Yet even though I don’t participate in any July 4th party planning, 4th of July is a pretty popular event on MyPunchbowl. We have lots of 4th of July invitations to choose from and lots of great party tips and advice for your 4th of July party planning.

If you never have used MyPunchbowl before, why not get started today by sending a 4th of July save the date? You don’t need much information to send your save the date — simply put in the date and place of your 4th of July party and send it off to your friends and family. Come back a few weeks before the event to send your online invitations. Easy and simple.

Here’s are a few of the 4th of July party invitations that are available on MyPunchbowl:

I’ve been a big fan of Amazon ever since I’ve discovered their “Prime” shipping option. For $99 a year, Prime shipping offers you and four of your family members/friends the ability to order anything from Amazon and get free 2 day shipping. I’ve been a Prime member for two years now, and I’ve significantly increased my usage of Amazon as a result (full disclosure: after discovering Prime I bought a few shares of Amazon and have watched the stock double in this time period –woohoo!).

This morning, I noticed that Amazon has announced a new service called TextBuyit. After trying it out this morning, I’ve realized that this will literally change the way I shop forever.

Ever since I became an Amazon Prime member, I’d often jot down the name of the book or gift that I saw in a store, come back home and order it online. For the holiday season, this was very useful– since I have the physical addresses of friends and family already pre-loaded into Amazon and shipping is free we sent a few gifts along directly from Amazon. Easy and simple.

With TextBuyit, Amazon has taken it one step further. Now, while I’m in the store, I can text message Amazon the basic details of the item, and Amazon will text me back with the price. To purchase the item, I can simply text message back “1″ to Amazon. Pretty cool. Here’s a graphic that explains it all:

This new service will change the way I shop forever. Everytime I’m close to buying something in a store, I’ll check to see the Amazon price. With free shipping on Amazon, it will be a no-brainer to order from Amazon. I can literally be in the aisle of the book store (or electronics store) and decide to purchase on Amazon instead. Wow.

I believe that this will have huge implications for brick and mortar stores in the long-run. Amazon has just inserted their storefront into virtually every book, electronic, and grocery store in America. Amazon has just changed the way I’ll shop forever — a truly disruptive technology.

Damn, this web thing is pretty cool.

Happy Birthday to all of the people who celebrate their birthday on Leap Day!

A few weeks ago we rolled out a few “Leap Day Birthday” templates, and they’ve been quite popular. Based on this surprising popularity, I was curious to see how many people might actually have a Leap Day birthday. Here’s an interesting site about Leap Day birthdays that I found. According to this “Honor Society” there are about 200,000 people in US and 4 million people worldwide. My new goal: I want MyPunchbowl to be THE online birthday party planning site for Leap Day birthdays by 2012. With a little marketing, that should be achievable… (for you marketing geeks, talk about long tail!)

Here’s one of the Leap Day birthday party themes we rolled out:

For all of you who are celebrating today..Happy Birthday! Try and get 4x of everything (presents, cake, attention…). And don’t forget to come back and visit MyPunchbowl in 2012!

We’ve been pretty heads down here over the last week or so. It always gets that way around here right before a major new release. Today, we’re excited to tell you about the latest version of MyPunchbowl.

MyPunchbowl now includes a sophisticated party planning notification system, named “Buzz”, which tracks host and guests interactions as they happen. MyPunchbowl Buzz offers the host personalized alerts during every phase of party planning. Guests can enable their own alerts on the site by signing up for a MyPunchbowl account.

The MyPunchbowl Buzz notification system is a significant step forward for our app. We’ve built a robust notification system that’s capable of handing any kind of messaging– we’ll be rolling out RSS by the end of the week, with SMS and instant messaging to follow. MyPunchbowl is no longer a static party planning site –it’s now a constantly-updating system for every stage of party planning. Based on the platform we’ve built, you can expect some pretty interesting things from MyPunchbowl in the future– we’re building a Buzz API to allow developers to build custom apps around this data (think Facebook app, embeddable widget, Twitter etc). We’re really excited about how this opens up our app.

I’ll write more about MyPunchbowl Buzz in a future post. In the meantime, here’s a screenshot of a MyPunchbowl account with the new Buzz notification system:

Today, MyPunchbowl.com is introducing a new line of themed online invitations for the gay, lesbian, transgender and bisexual (GLBT) community.

Over the past year, a significant number of people have asked us for GLBT templates. The common requests are for gay marriage and civil unions, but once in a while we get other requests like coming out or adoption.  We want MyPunchbowl.com to be a place for everyone who is planning a celebration, so we’re happy to oblige.

We’ve decided to introduce these new online invitations to coincide with National Coming Out Day, which is today, October 11th. We have over 25 new templates, including gay marriage, civil union, second parent adoption, coming out, gay pride, AIDS awareness among many others. We’ll be adding more everyday as users request them. Here is a screenshot of our “Choose a Design” page with the GLBT category selected:

To see these themes, and view a large preview, create an account on MyPunchbowl.com and create a new party.  

To all of you who asked for these new online invitations, we hope you like them. We would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions. To send us your thoughts, go to www.mypunchbowl.com and click Feedback/Support (on the bottom of the page).

We’re committed to do our part to celebrate equality and help spread lasting understanding and tolerance. To the millions of people who are pausing today to celebrate National Coming Out Day, we’re proud to join you.  We invite you to sign up for a MyPunchbowl account and take a look at our new gay and lesbian online invitations and party themes.

I’m very happy to announce a brand-new release of MyPunchbowl.com. More details later. For now, here’s the press release that is going out at midnight tonight:

MyPunchbowl.com adds new features for Halloween party planning, announces “Party Animal” Facebook application
 Enhanced version of MyPunchbowl.com ready for Halloween party planning, Facebook app “Party Animal” offers a fun new way to tell your friends how they act at a party 

Natick, Mass. (PRWeb) September 17, 2007 – Punchbowl Software today released a new version of its party planning software MyPunchbowl.com, adding to its leadership position as the most sophisticated event and party planning site on the web. MyPunchbowl.com is located at http://www.mypunchbowl.com  

With its unique workflow interface, MyPunchbowl.com is the perfect site for Halloween party planning. The new “Party Checklist” feature offers an innovative way to organize everything for a Halloween party. Party Checklist includes “Potluck,” a quick and simple way to ask your friends to bring something from the list to the party. The Party Checklist feature provides the ability for users to create their own categories, re-order checklist items, and indicate the most important items to track. Together, these features offer unprecedented party planning functionality for MyPunchbowl.com users. 

Today Punchbowl Software also announced a new application developed specifically for the Facebook platform. The new application “Party Animal” offers a fun new way to tell your friends how they act at a party. Facebook users can vote for their friends, choosing between personalities such as “Drunken Pig” and “Lone Wolf.” Facebook users can also unlock bonus animals by creating a MyPunchbowl.com account. Bonus animals include celebrity personalities such as “Paris Hilton” and “Snoop Dogg” and creative party animals such as a “Social Butterfly” and “Party Pooper.”  Facebook users are raving about Punchbowl Software’s Party Animal. “My friends all love the new Party Animal Facebook app,” said Molly Clark-Barol, a Senior at Yale University, “it’s fun to see how my friends think I act at a party, and I even got an idea for my Halloween costume.” 

MyPunchbowl.com has also been updated with many features that are perfect for Halloween party planning. Additional new features on MyPunchbowl.com include:

• 25+ Halloween party planning templates: themes include Halloween party templates appropriate for adult and kids Halloween parties
• Penelope Plans: Resident party planning blogger Penelope writes on Halloween themes, ideas, and offers Halloween party planning advice
• New guest view: A new tabbed view provides guests with the ability to quickly indicate if they are bringing friends to the event, as well as what they will bring from the Potluck list.
• Unlimited Co-hosts: MyPunchbowl users can invite a friend to help them host the party. MyPunchbowl events can have unlimited co-hosts.
• Duplicate a party: With a single click, any event can be copied, which provides a quick and easy way to start your next party
• Notifications: Hosts and guests can now choose to receive notifications when any activity takes place on the party message boards
• On-screen Help: MyPunchbowl now includes on screen guides to help users learn the features of the site
• Bounced email notification: Hosts now receive notification if their guest’s email address is incorrect

In addition, Punchbowl Software has selected Engine Yard as its new web hosting provider, to better handle the popularity of MyPunchbowl.com and to improve overall performance. “We’re excited to help MyPunchbowl.com grow,” said Tom Mornini of Engine Yard, “our dedicated cluster technology can scale to meet their needs.” 

MyPunchbowl offers party planning tools to help hosts look good. It’s the perfect site for planning holidays, life milestone events, as well as adult and kids birthday parties. This latest release provides new features and functionality just in time for Halloween. “We’re a small and nimble company,” said Matt Douglas, Founder of Punchbowl Software, “we’re excited that we can offer great new features right in time for Halloween party planning.”

To sign up for a free MyPunchbowl account, visit http://www.mypunchbowl.com

This morning I came across an interesting post from the founder of Fog Creek Software, Joel Spolsky. Joel wrote about his experience dealing with a web design firm. Writing about his new web design Joel wrote, “We’ve been tweaking it and polishing it and changing things carefully, and the firm we hired to design it has been taking us step-by-step through information architecture, site maps, wireframes, initial designs, and several rounds of design. All with a carefully-designed process to get our buy-in at every step along the way. And so far every step I thought the design was converging and we’d get a nice web design out of it. And then I came back after a week on the road, took one look at it, and thought, oh crap. We can’t go public with that.”

I read this post and chuckled. This exact phenomenon has happened to me numerous times as I’ve developed software user interfaces and marketing campaigns. It’s frustrating for the people you work with. In many cases, just like Joel, people around me have gotten my buy-in all along the way. And then bam! I take a fresh look at it and no longer like it.

So why does this happen? I think there are a bunch of factors that lead to this kind of a moment. Here are a few:

1) We’ve all lost sight of the “main” thing: In my opinion, a good design clearly points the user to the main purpose of the page. In the times where I’ve had the “just not right” feeling, I look at the design and think to myself “I don’t see the main point of this page.” That’s a clear sign.

2) It doesn’t feel right: The reality is that we all have our own sense of what “feels right.” If it doesn’t feel right to you, then you just have to fix it.  Joshua Porter wrote today that “people make sense to themselves.” I agree. And people know for themselves what looks good and feels right. When you’re the final decision maker (like Joel), it’s critical that you know when to say “this doesn’t look right.” The key is choosing when and how to say that, and to not do it too frequently (unless you want to really piss off the designers and engineers).

3) It doesn’t look as good as Blahblah.com: I don’t care what your process of design is, but if at the end of the day you look at your design and then you look at someone else’s design and you feel inferior, then you have to go fix it. I’ve been in this situation many times. We *thought* we were on the right path, but the final product simply didn’t look as good as something else we had seen. The key to communication with designers is to clearly explain why you think Blahblah.com is better — and be as specific as possible. The better you can articulate the differences, the more likely they are to work with you to fix the design.

I applaud Joel for recognizing that sometimes you have to stop the presses and revisit your design. Even if you are “on board” all of the way through the process, you have to be truly happy and proud of the final product. After all, users don’t have the insight to see the process along the way. They only see the final product. And it better be great if you want to keep them as users.

My co-founder (Sean) and I spent lots of time designing MyPunchbowl.com well before we hired any software engineers. It’s sometimes amusing to think about how much time we spent in front of the whiteboard– but we believe that products should be designed first, then implemented. Of course there is a balance. You can’t design every detail about a feature before you begin implementation. Many times the nuances about a particular feature only are clear when you have a chance to actually use it. So how do you guide your decision-making as you are tweaking a feature?

For us, we developed an internal mantra that helps guide our decision-making. It’s a mantra that I remind the team of often. It’s an important guiding principle. Our mantra is simply this: Help the host look good.

This may seem like an easy mantra to implement, but it’s not. As we make design decisions, we constantly have to make tradeoffs between what is better for guests and what is better for hosts. Using this mantra, these decisions become easier. Here’s an example: our RSVP options are all based on helping the host look good. There are other ways to implement these RSVP features that might be better for guests, but we believe that our role at MyPunchbowl.com is to help hosts look good. This mantra makes hard design decisions much easier.

It’s great when we get validation from real customers. Chris from Idaho recently wrote to us: “We used MyPunchbowl for our first family reunion in 20+ years and everyone, I mean everyone, was totally satisfied with the MyPunchbowl invitation. Our reunion was in Seattle (and I’m in Idaho) and because of your site/service it made me look so GOOD! Thanks for making it so Fabulous! Chris from Middleton Idaho.”

I’m convinced that all great products have mantras.

What’s your product’s mantra?