Jumping from one crowded space to another, Evite competitor MyPunchbowl has just launched a new service for free eCards, allowing users to send customized greeting cards using its impressive card editor. Users will be able to choose from an array of holiday, birthday, and thank you cards, which they can embellish with family photos and a number of text effects.

CEO Matt Douglas says that while there are many other sites on the web that offer free Ecards, the vast majority of them are unprofessional and aren’t very visually appealing. With MyPunchbowl’s Ecard Studio, Douglas says that the company is striving for an electronic equivalent to the classier (but more expensive) sort of card you might find in a stationary store. The service makes use of the editing platform MyPunchbowl originally introduced in October, which features an intuitive and powerful toolset along with realistic textured “virtual paper”.

Ecards are a logical step for MyPunchbowl – the company had developed the technology for the card designer anyway, and Ecards serve as a great way to expose the site to more users. But the real power behind these cards will likely emerge once MyPunchbowl allows users to print copies of their custom-made intricate designs. Douglas said that the company doesn’t have anything to announce yet (printing multilayered cards isn’t trivial), but that we’ll probably hear more on the matter soon.

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MyPunchbowl, an eVite competitor that opened its doors early last year, has launched a ‘2.0′ version of its site that features a revamped interface and a very impressive custom electronic invitation creator.

MyPunchbowl CEO Matt Douglas says that his team has integrated improvements throughout the site for the new release, including an enhanced address book, the ability to send test invites (to make sure they appear correctly in mail clients), and various UI changes. And while these features are welcome additions to the site, the site’s most significant release is easily its invitation Design Studio.

Douglas, who worked at Adobe for years, says that his team has created a card designer that is similar in many ways to Adobe’s Photoshop. While the designer has a very intuitive and simple interface, it allows users to manipulate layer opacity, color, and texture with very little effort. Users are offered a library of pre-made cards as well as some basic templates, all of which can be customized to include user-defined text, fonts, and colors. While many users will simply choose one of the pre-fabricated cards, the flexibility afforded by the designer will definitely appeal to a large portion of MyPunchbowl’s userbase.

Of course, these cards will only appear in Email form for now, but Douglas says that the company is in talks with major printers. While there a many other places to get custom cards printed, the ability to send both electronic and traditional invites (especially ones that look so nice) could give MyPunchbowl a leg up on its many competitors.

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Yahoo may have beat them to it with the launch of its Digg clone, but MyPunchbowl too wants to announce something called “Buzz”, this one a Facebook News Feed clone of sorts for party planning.

MyPunchbowl Buzz will give hosts and guests alike a way to keep track of what’s going on with the party scene as organized through the site. Initially it will consist of the onsite info stream shown below, but there are plans to expand its scope to include RSS, instant messaging, and SMS-based notifications as well. An API will eventually be provided for developers to leverage the Buzz data for whatever purposes they desire off-site.

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So there’s still room for the killer event site, and startups keep trying. A couple of weeks ago we wrote about MadeIt, a new site that not only allows users to create new events but also to add content before and after. Like the others, though, it centers on the invitation to an event and whether you are going or not.

St. Louis based IMThere, which I discovered on TechnicallySpeaking, is a little different, and joins MadeIt as the most recent startups to try to crack the event nut. IMThere is focused less on getting invitations to events out to friends and talking them into accepting. Instead, it allows users to upload events, focusing less on the private invitation stuff (parties, dinners, etc.). Instead, the site’s early content is mostly about public events like concerts, video game releases, TV premiers, movie releases, etc.

Other users can then add their own content, ranging from comments about the event to uploading pictures from mobile phones during the event itself.

The resulting content is more interesting to the public than those private dinner parties. And top level navigation allows browsing by person, venue, artist, etc. So you can see all the events your friends participated in, see all the past and future concerts at a local venue, and see all past and future album releases and concerts by a particular artist. Users can also search events by popularity, region, etc.

The result seems to be a compelling user experience that could result in real local communities springing up and interacting around stuff that’s happening around them. Mobile interaction is excellent, so heavy users will be accessing it from all of their devices regularly.

See the demo/overview video here. There’s no guarantee IMThere won’t be in the deadpool in six months, but if they can quickly grow a core set of passionate users, they could have a nice property on their hands. IMThere is the first project from parent company Ramped Media.

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MyPunchbowl is a later entrant that focuses on the details of planning your soirée. They’ve been building out tools for each step of planning a party: finding supplies, inviting friends, setting a date, and the after party. Today, MyPunchbowl has made setting a date that much easier through the help of an algorithm that recommends the best date for your party.

Previously, MyPunchbowl members picked a date by building consensus by talking on the invite’s bulletin board. The process is similar for the other event planning sites, except for Renkoo, which uses IM and a majority rules vote instead of bulletin boards. Now, with MyPunchbowl, you can avoid the bulletin board mess and find a date using the new “Pick-A-Date” feature, which recommends the best date from a set of dates supplied by the host. “Pick-A-Date” does this all in real time, giving greater importance to the schedules for the host and important guests. It’s best illustrated by checking out the video embedded below.

Now when you make an event, you can select multiple dates and times that work, specifying whether they are either “better” dates, or just “ok”. Since some events need key guests, MyPunchbowl also lets you pick VIPs, who have a greater effect on which date the algorithm recommends.

As RSVPs roll in, guests choose which dates don’t work, are ok, or are the best for themselves. After each RSVP the algorithm recalculates which date is best for the majority of the group, giving the greatest weight to VIPs. Real time feedback encourages the remaining guests to reschedule their calendars around the date that works the best for the majority of the group or the guest of honor. At any time, the host can choose a date for the event, using the recommended date as a guide without the hassle of long email or bulletin board threads.

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There’s a list of services already lining up to take on the dot com veteran in all their Ajaxy glory. Renkoo, Skobee, and Socializr are a few we’ve covered already. Renkoo and Skobee have diferentiated themselves by incorporating the pre-evite event planning stage, and MyPunchbowl has done the same.

MyPunchbowl has taken a more rigorous approach to party planning by creating a workflow model, providing a great amount of control at each step. Each party starts out as a save the date or full invite and is carried all the way through to the after-party info. Throughout the whole process you and your guests can chat on a party message board, send out updates to a few or all guests, re-edit any step of the process, and fully manage the RSVP status.

Save-the-Dates get the basic details about the event – what and where – out to your friends by email with a Plaxo-supported contacts importer. Invitations finalize the date/time and guest list including a map. Both of these invitations are customizable by color and event photo (with embedded Flickr photo search). Unlike other services, MyPunchbowl has personalized RSVP messages, allowing for a better-than-boilerplate way to invite your guests. It’s not as pretty as the other services, but that’s sure to change over time.

After you have your event mapped, a party store locator points out several chains of party stores. Like travel planning sites, monetization will most likely come through affiliate deals with stores and other party services.

The after-party stage allows members to share photos on static URLs and chat about the event. In the future, the after-party stage will also consist of ratings and recommendations that will inform other party-goers. The ability to not only plan a party, but learn from the experiences of other party planners will be an attractive feature in party planning and provide a strong reason to choose MyPunchbowl over the others.

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