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I thought I'd follow up my [Super Bowl Party][1] article with some more in depth reviews of the services mentioned and to kick that off we'll start with [MyPunchBowl][2]. As I mention in the article, MyPunchBowl is a party planning site designed to help you create a webpage for your party.
MyPunchBowl takes the familiar features of Evite and raises the bar considerably by offering a wide range of social networking tools to help you plan and organize your party as well as interact with your guests both before and after your party.
Once you sign up for an account you can get started by creating a party. MyPunchBowl has a number of preset templates for parties (right now they've got a special "football party" template) or you can create your own custom templates.
There's a number of ways to customize your party's page including some nice Ajax color widgets that updates in realtime. Other options include uploading a picture (or pulling one in from your Flickr account) and mapping tools via Google Maps.
Once you have your party page looking the way you want it, it's time to add your friends to your guest list. MyPunchBowl can import your contacts list from just about any popular email service including, GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo, or if all else fails you can export your contacts as a .csv file import them.
After you have your guest list filled in, you can start sending out invites. If you don't have clear plans yet, but you know you want to have a party on certain date, you can send out a "save the date" message to your guest list and follow up later with details.
Perhaps my favorite feature of MyPunchBowl is the ability to append personalized messages at the top of each mass email you send. Its a nice touch and it will make your mailing seem a little less generic.
Once your announcement goes out, MyPunchBowl makes it easy to coordinate with your guests. There's a message board for posting comments or suggestions and you can always send out individual messages to encourage the slackers.
For the vast majority of the party panning sites I looked at, that's the end of the story, but MyPunchBowl offers some nice after-party features like the ability to display your photos on your party page. If you host your photos on Flickr it's easy to pull them in to your MyPunchBowl page, just enter your Flickr username and all the sets in your photostream will come up (note that depending on how may sets you have, this could take a minute). Select the set you want to display and MyPunchBowl will pull display it for all your guests to see.
And photo sharing isn't limited to just the host, anyone on your guest list can add their photos as well, which gives you a single page from which to see all your party pics.
One key thing MyPunchBowl lacks at the moment is SMS support which would be handy for the those last-minute, day-of reminders. The folks behind MyPunchBowl assure me that they're planning SMS support for the near future, but in the mean time you'll have to take care of that yourself.
[1]: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,72613-0.html?tw=wn_culture_2 "Geek Up Your Super Bowl"
[2]: http://www.mypunchbowl.com/ "MyPunchBowl"
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