Electronic-Age Etiquette

How cool are you?

The answer to this question may rely heavily on whether you’ve ever received an Evite, or even know what one is. Me, I’ve received Evites, but to be honest, I am way cooler than most people over 40. (At the same time, I am way crankier than most people under 50.) But I was amazed to find how many of my contemporaries didn’t know about Evites.

The concept was launched in 1998 by two Stanford grads, and depending on your disposition, it could be regarded as a fun and convenient way to mount a party by sending invitations over the Internet, or as the end of civilization. The founders were looking for a way to harness the power of the Internet to improve one’s social life. You want to have a party? Go to Evite.com and fill out the template, which will prompt you for the time, date and place of your party. Easy enough. Evite will send the invitations and keep track of your guest list. An Evite begins with an e-mail, for example:

“Hi John Smith, Martin Booe has sent you an Evite.”

The recipient can then click on a link for details about the party.

Now the Evite company generates, on average, 9.6 million invitations a month for more than 250,000 events, with its user demographic steering hard toward the 25 to 35 set, most of them residing in larger cities. Little surprise, then, that Evite is 100% advertising supported and is the largest online vehicle for alcohol-related advertising.

As with all things IT, synergy is key, and it’s no coincidence that Evite’s sister company is Citysearch.com. Evite encourages you to pony up your profile--gender, age, profession and a few of your favorite things--to create a new generation of personal ad that doesn’t explicitly state that you’re on the make, while subtly figuring ways for marketers to shake the change out of your pockets.

Now, from an etiquette standpoint, this is where the idea gets complicated. Do you want your RSVP list posted for all to see? (More than 90% of Evite users do.)

A lot of people I know think that posting the guest list, along with an invitee’s pithy RSVP, can be toxic. Posts come in two flavors. First, there are innocuous, unself-conscious comments such as “Can we bring anything?” Others use it as a platform to shake their tail feathers, as evidenced by such recently observed posts as: “Sorry, but I’ll be in Philly rejecting ‘Real World’ wannabes at an open casting call.” Or, “Darn. We’ll be at the Cape all of August.” Or, “That’s one of my New York weeks. No can do.” For the record, if you find any of the responses obnoxious or lacking in enthusiasm, you have the power to go in and edit their words more to your liking. You can also block the visible posting function but continue to monitor which of your invitees have perused their Evites and are hesitating to commit.

But there’s another issue with posting the guest list: It allows for a good deal of self-selecting, a brutal culling of the herd. If one of your invited guests is single, for example, and notices that most of the other invitees are married with children, your single friend might be tempted to reorganize his CD collection that night.

It gets even more complicated. After RSVPing to a few Evites, you will find yourself enmeshed in the extended family you never knew you had. Thus, Evite began to needle me about sending an invitation to people in my “network”--people who’ve been Evited to the same parties as you. (Among them was a gent in Civil War regalia toting a presumably fake Smith & Wesson; no way are you coming to my party, dude.) And your invitees have the power to extend your invitation to friends of their own. Thus, the nom de net “Creepy Guy Who Hits on Chicks” responded enthusiastically when I sent Evite invitations to a Fake Bongo Party, which I specified would not commence at 4 a.m. on a certain Wednesday.

Now, the idea of a Fake Bongo Party has a history to it. A couple of years ago, I invited a bunch of friends to what I randomly termed a Bongo Party. What exactly did this mean? Nothing in particular. I don’t own any bongos, nor do I know anyone who does. I just liked the concept of a Bongo Party. However, the party’s success was instructive about the value of good marketing. Before I knew it, I had people calling me up, telling me that they had heard I was having a Bongo Party and wondering if they could come, and by the way, they had a couple of friends who had always wanted to attend a Bongo Party. Then they asked the not unreasonable question, “What is a Bongo Party?” I told them they would have to find out for themselves, and this only added to the party’s mystique. I’ve never had more people turn out.

Now, in my experience, people in these parts constantly complain that it’s impossible to get an accurate head count whenever they throw a party. I felt that I had come up with the perfect L.A. social proposition: inviting people to a nonexistent party that allowed them to incur goodwill by promising to come without having to actually show up. I specified that they were to wear royal purple and elk antlers.

Naturally, about a third ignored the request for an RSVP. Had my social status dropped? Had the once-inexorable appeal of the Bongo Party worn off?

All was not lost. In the end--and this may be the real value of Evites--I think people enjoyed the Fake Bongo Party more than they would have a real one. In fact, I received several photos commemorating the non-event, thanks to an Evite alliance with an online photo service. As it happens, my friend Lise in Ohio is a whiz with Photoshop and concocted a picture of a mosh pit of hardy-partying twentysomethings. She inserted a picture of me eating a fish taco that appeared in Westways magazine a couple of years ago, as well as a photo of another friend playing bagpipes amid the revelry.

Wish I’d been there. It looked like fun.