theregoesdave

Evite is still the mother of all Online Invitation sites and they now have a mobile web interface that allows you to send Quickvites to your friends on the go. I’ve had a chance to play with it a little bit and am looking forward to seeing how useful it is in the coming weeks.

In order to use the general evite mobile web interface to view current invitations, you can simply log onto http://m.evite.com. It doesn’t obscure your password which makes me wonder about the security level, but the interface is clean and gives you a nice snapshot of the event, location and evite response summaries.

If you want to send mobile Quickvites, you’ll need to set up your account from a desktop computer. I’m a bit puzzled as to why the service isn’t automatically available for all users and incorporated into their overall contact management system, but I took it for a spin to see how it works. You can basically add contacts from your evite contact list or import them via a web interface.

Importing contacts turned out to be a bit more difficult than I though necessary. You can import contacts webmail services including yahoo, hotmail and gmail, although those contact lists are unlikely to include mobile numbers, which is kind of a nifty feature. You can also upload contacts from Outlook, but not via the standard export and upload csv method. They have a Java Wizard that taps into direct access to Outlook and you can limit the amount of time they have access to your system. When I uploaded my contacts, it did a good job of finding duplicates between my evite contact list and Outlook contacts, but did a poor job of pulling mobile phone numbers from Outlook. They also have a .CSV file upload method, but you have to edit your Outlook export file to match their template.

Once you’ve loaded all your contacts and, in my case, manually included the mobile phone numbers for the people you want to Quickvite, you can then choose which contacts to include in your subset of Quickvite contacts and form groups. Since this whole process is kind of a bear, it limits the amount of people you’ll want to add and thereby the usefulness of the application.

When you send out the Quickvite your friends get both a text message and email inviting them to the event. This seems a bit noisy, but not terribly so. I’d prefer that it defaulted to SMS and only sent an email if there is no telephone number for that contact. They can respond via a button in the email, going to the evite site, or simply replying to the text message with a ‘Y’ or ‘N’. When you’re in the desktop view you can choose individual contacts, but from the mobile interface you can only choose from the groups that you created on your desktop.

Overall it seems like they still have some kinks to work out in contact upload and management, but the concept here is very solid. Hopefully they can improve the functionality while keeping the nice clean design. Their site also mentions a forthcoming mobile phone application, which could help with integrated contact management.

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