purple trail (beta)

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Party-throwers have something new to celebrate. The beta service PurpleTrail is the most recent entrant in online invitation sites, and with its innovative use of technologies like Adobe AIR and Ruby on Rails, may be the most forward-looking. The site still trails more established invite competitors like Evite and MyPunchbowl in advanced features and design options, but its mobile capabilities, integration with other Web services like Facebook, and lightweight Adobe AIR-based desktop client software keep it right in the fray.

Sign-up is as simple as it gets: Give your full name, e-mail address, and password, complete a CAPTCHA challenge, click on a link in a confirmation e-mail you get, and you're on your way down the mauve trail. You can also flesh out your profile with a picture, a personal message, and the URL of your personal site (your blog, for example, or MySpace page), as well as your country, time zone, anniversary, and birth date. For chatting with attendees about events, you can enter instant-messaging IDs for AIM, Gtalk, MSN, andYahoo!. The service will import address books from AOL, Evite, Gmail, MSN, Plaxo, Yahoo!, and—if you export them first to a CSV file—Outlook. You can choose to keep your profile and contact info private, let anyone contact you, or let only those on your PurpleTrail contact list reach you.

For designing invitations, PurpleTrail offers themes in 25 categories: College Party, Let's Go Bowling, Groundhog Day, all the obvious holidays, and more. But many categories have only one theme, and in that respect, the site has a long way to go to catch up with Evite or even MyPunchbowl. You'll also find far fewer capabilities for customizing elements like colors and background images than in other invitation sites; once you choose a premade theme, you're pretty much stuck with it. There's one nice touch, though: When you pick a theme from the selections on the top of the page, it's instantly applied to your invitation draft.

The process for entering event details is the simplest of any online invitation service: You just answer the questions When and Where. You can propose more than one date and time, letting guests weigh in, or you can specify an approximate time, such as "sometime next weekend," and let invitees suggest different times as well as places—a feature unique to PurpleTrail.

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