We want to highlight some of the cool features setdot brings to event planning. Our feature highlight for this post will focus on the benefits of venue reviews in setdot.

I created a birthday event on setdot last week for a close friend of mine. My friend is picky about where he eats and more importantly, he is vegan. I created an event in setdot pretty easily and quickly. When it came to picking the restaurant, I used setdot’s innovative location search feature. I typed in “vegan” and in no time, I got a list of the San Francisco vegan restaurants and vegan stores with their yelp reviews. Pretty easy so far!!

Notice the “Reviews from yelp” in the search results. I was able to quickly look up detailed reviews for restaurants by simply clicking on their respective reviews. I picked the highest rated restaurant, sent the invite out and put my feet up. This neat little feature saved me time and earned me a pat on the back for the “excellent restaurant choice”. We even managed to hit up that vegan ice cream parlor at the end of the night!

Hopefully this gives you an idea on the usefulness of setdot’s venue reviews. In the upcoming weeks, we will highlight other cool event planning techniques on setdot.

Here are a few of the key new features:

• Open Registration. We’re officially removing “beta” from our site. Now, anyone can sign up for a setdot account.
• New Themes. We’ve added several new themes. Whether you’re planning a barbecue, housewarming party, poker night, bridal shower, save-the-date, wedding, or Halloween party, we’ve got you covered.
• Driving Directions. There’s no need to copy and paste the address to any mapping tool anymore. You can now get step-by-step directions to your event within setdot.
• Venue Reviews. Not sure where to have your next event? Our location search will display results with Yelp reviews to help you make the best venue decision.
• Promote Your Events. We offer two different widgets to promote your favorite public events on your blog or personal website.
• Add Event to Your Calendar. Afraid of forgetting about an event? With setdot, you can block out time on your personal calendar (Google, Yahoo, or Outlook) for your events so you’ll never forget again.
• Message Moderation. You now have the ability to delete unwanted, incorrect, or inappropriate messages posted for your event.
• Visitor Tracking. See how many times your event has been looked at. You’ll also be able to see which specific guests have looked at your invitations.

There’s still more! Sign up for an account now and create your first event to see all this for yourself.

As always, we would love to hear feedback from you. Watch out for upcoming blog entries on how you can effectively and easily use some of the new features.

In the meantime, we will continue to release minor updates.

We are excited about the new features and we know that you will love using setdot for all your event planning needs.

Stay tuned!

1. Chris Garner, downloadsquad.com on how to plan, organize and manage events with setdot.

2. Barry’s Best Blog to setting up awesome events with setdot.

3. rev2.org on setdot launches killer app for event management.

The response have been just great so far. We want to thank everyone for taking the time out to review setdot.

For now, we will send out invitations to you to join setdot as and when our systems are ready to accept new users.