Webware

The meeting scheduler utility TimeBridge is growing up and expanding its mission. No longer just a schedule helper, the service is getting more tools to keep meetings that have already started running on time.

The company is still selling an online meeting product, based on DimDim. It's adding now a tool to let attendees collaborate on the agenda beforehand (I doubt it will ever get used, people are too lazy), and more importantly, it's getting a nag feature that will let a meeting organizer set the service to ping people via SMS or e-mail right before a meeting starts. Once a meeting is underway, there's also a new option to nag laggards to show up, again via SMS or e-mail.

The TimeBridge Web and e-mail UIs are cleaned up a little.

(Credit: TimeBridge)

The ping features have a feedback mechanism as well. Messages come with short URLs that direct to response page that includes quick-reply options such as "Be there in 5 minutes" or "Sorry I can't make it." Unfortunately, "Sorry but I have to vacuum my cat" is not in the quick list, but you can type whatever you want as a reply instead. The ping feature will eventually be part of the paid TimeBridge Plus service for $8.95 a month, but it's free at the moment.

The iPhone and other mobile interfaces for TimeBridge let you gracefully (or not) bow out of a meeting.

(Credit: TimeBridge)

There's also a very interesting new iPhone app for TimeBridge currently pending approval at Apple. It lets you scan your agenda (with a time line for your meeting), or ping the late people. You can also use the iPhone app to dial in to a TimeBridge conference call directly.

The service gets a cleaned-up user interface overall, which should help reduce the annoyance that people may feel when they get TimeBridge invitations but aren't familiar with the service. And there's an improved way for people to set up one-on-one meetings; it appropriately allows a little more schedule sharing than many-person meetings.

CEO Yori Neklin told me these changes reflect his belief that "TimeBridge solved scheduling, but meetings themselves are still screwed up." I'm not so sure scheduling is indeed solved, but I do agree that most meetings are awful. I believe the new features will help more meetings start on time, and might just make a tiny dent in the content of meetings themselves. But that's fine. Every little bit helps.

See also Tungle launches non-annoying scheduling service and Beyond freemium: The Timebridge business model works.

ScheduleOnce, the service that helps multiple users find the best time to have a meeting, has new(ish) tool that lets users access its service without leaving the Google Calendar interface.

Using it requires installing a small add-on that currently works only in Firefox and IE with IE7Pro installed. Users then get a new ScehduleOnce menu in the left side of Calendar, either through Google Apps, or in the public version of Google Calendar. The control widget lets them see a list of meetings they have scheduled, along with the option to create a new one as if they were doing so back on ScheduleOnce.

What's really interesting about this add-on is that as of this week, it could no longer require the download to work. On Tuesday Google opened up a new API for developers to create sidebar gadgets in Calendar. A widget that makes use of this could let users keep track of tentative meetings they've set up, however any scheduling may still require going back to ScheduleOnce's site.

(Credit: ScheduleOnce)

I'm a Google Calendar user. It's easy to use. And for the most part, it helps keep the schedules of individual users organized. But one of its shortcomings is in scheduling meetings. In my experience, it just isn't nearly as advanced as it should be when it comes to things like arranging meetings among a group of people in various time slots. And unfortunately, the same goes for Yahoo Calendar and Microsoft's Live Calendar.

So I've decided to venture out in search of online applications for scheduling. Some are better than others, but many are worth trying out.

Scheduling apps

Calendarfly: Calendarfly is designed for schools, small organizations, or families. After you register with Calendarfly, you're immediately brought to a cluttered page that's difficult to understand, at first. But after a while, you'll get used to it.

When you start adding events to your calendar, Calendarfly lets you share them with others. Parents can also have their child's events added to their own calendar in a different color, keeping them apprised of what's going on in their child's life. Calendarfly lets you input the location of the event you're planning, thanks to its new geo-coding feature. It can be a little buggy, but it usually works well. If you're a teacher, parent, or coach, Calendarfly isn't a bad scheduling option.

Calendarfly has categories for schools and families.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Divvy: Divvy isn't your typical scheduling tool. In fact, it's designed to help you make more money in your business. But its scheduling tool is really handy. When you want to create an appointment, the tool brings you to a simple input page that lets you pick the time, as well as add a description and a title.

If you're operating a business, you can also input how much the appointment will cost. Thanks to Divvy's vanity URLs, you can direct people to your personal Divvy page, giving them full access to your appointment availability. They can then schedule a time on your page in seconds. It works well.

Check your availability in Divvy.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Genbook: Genbook, similar to Divvy, is designed for small businesses that want to streamline their scheduling. The tool first requires you to input your business information. From there, you can list your services and input on the app's calendar when you'll be available.

Creating appointments is made easy with the site's appointment tool. But my favorite feature is Genbook's Customers module, which automatically saves pertinent customer information whenever one signs up for an appointment. It displays the customer's name, address, phone number, and e-mail address. It's really helpful. Genbook comes in three versions--Free, Solo ($19.95 per month), and Standard ($39.95 per month).

GenBook makes it easy to set up an appointment.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

The meeting time broker TimeDriver, which has been in closed testing since I covered it back in January, will finally enter its public beta period on Monday. I had a chance to play with the product Thursday. For a lot of people, this service could be a great help.

TimeDriver is designed to help people who need to schedule a lot of one-on-one meetings. If you're interviewing job candidates, for example, or taking appointments with customers, you can set up either one-time or recurring blocks of time, and send people links that let them grab appointment times in those blocks that remain unclaimed.

You can also just put a link on your Web page or in your e-mails and take appointments from anyone. Yikes.

My time is yours. Live demo. Try it.

TimeDriver can link to Google or Outlook calendars if you want to make sure you're not booking appointments on top of your one-off meetings, and the system will then write appointments back into your calendar when people claim times. There are advanced options that can prevent people from scheduling last-minute meetings or from seeing more than a few time slots; you wouldn't want to look unbusy, would you? But there's no way to automatically enforce buffer times between meetings, which might matter if you make house calls.

The service has tools to send out blast e-mails to people (for example, job candidates you want to interview) and will track all their responses. Coming soon is a new Outlook plug-in that will let you send meeting requests from within your Outlook client itself; in the current version you can only manage mass meeting invitations from within TimeDriver.

My weekly demo timeslots.

TimeDriver is a different beast than a meeting negotiation product like TimeBridge, which allows for multi-person meetings and encourages a form of voting on best times to meet. That kind of solution is better for people like me who treat each meeting separately; TimeDriver is better for people who see one meeting as much like the next.

The basic TimeDriver service is free. Paid and enterprise versions will get additional features, such as calendar pooling--so multiple people can service appointment requests--analytics tools, and custom branding options.

Future versions may include variable privacy, so specific people or groups can see more detail of your calendar, or so some users need confirmation from you before a meeting is booked, but others don't.

I look forward to seeing this tool integrated into other online customer management solutions, like Salesforce.com. Or better yet, adopted by my dentist.

See also: Timebridge (review), Jiffle (formerly iPolipo; review), ScheduleOnce (review).

Mixin is a very pretty and simplistic scheduling tool that makes your calendar readily available to others. It's been designed to help you block out time and keep everything organized with color coding and an entry system that makes creating a new event as easy as typing just a few characters.

Like Twitter it centers around a blank box on the top of the screen where you can drop in text, along with a timeline of what's on your plate for the next five days. To create a new plan or item you can simply jot down what you want using conversational text, so writing "grab a beer at Dave's pub at 6" will convert that to a recognizable event that goes in your schedule. You can also accomplish the same thing by typing "Beer@Dave's 6."

The system rewards advanced users fewer keystrokes by learning some basic shortcuts, but those looking to create a more detailed entry can toggle an advanced view that lets you pop in things like addresses, specific times, and RSVP options.

Making new events, proposals, or ideas is a single line affair. You can also turn on advanced view to access more customizable event creation tools.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Right after you make an event anyone who has subscribed to you will be alerted, and depending on their notification settings that means they could be getting real-time updates by SMS or a simple e-mail. From there users can interact with the event like they would on Facebook or Upcoming to make time or location suggestions, add photos and videos, or leave a note to explain why they're not going.

One thing to note up front is that Mixin doesn't sync up with Microsoft Exchange or any other calendar data feeds. Instead, you must include mixin@mixin.com as a guest when creating or planning to attend an event in any calendaring tool you're using and it will parse that data and convert it into an event on your Mixin calendar. It's not a perfect system, but if you're not worried about two-way sync this is a viable solution.

I'm still a little wary to recommend Mixin to the the casual user. As a standalone tool it offers little in the way of organization compared to most calendaring tools. Where it shines, however, is the social integration with other Mixin users. Like tools that help find a consensus for a single meeting time, Mixin does something similar with your social or work life. If you and your friends are willing to hunker down and log your schedules onto Mixin's servers there's a lot of power here, however I think Google's Calendar service is far easier for basic scheduling and appointments. It also includes daily and monthly views, which I think are a must-have.

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I do appreciate the Google-simple start page.

Of all the meeting time brokers I've seen, Presdo is the most peculiar. Which means it's worth checking out. Unlike other apps I've covered (Timebridge, Jiffle, Tungle, Timedriver, etc.) Presdo's strength is not that it automates the selection of meeting times that work out for attendees (it doesn't), but rather that it helps script the dialogue that's usually a part of the back-and-forth in setting up a meeting.

What makes this service peculiar is that it does very little that you can't otherwise do through e-mail and Web surfing. However, it packages everything up so nicely you might not notice.

You kick off a meeting by typing into a plain English description of what you want to do, such as, "Get lunch on Monday with Joe," or, "Set up book club meeting with Jack, John, and Claire at Sparky's Diner." Then you get a screen showing what the system thinks you mean. It guesses at the times and dates, and you enter in missing information like e-mail addresses. It also helps you find and map locations for meetings.

Presdo is smart, but not brilliant. You have to hold its hand after you first tell it what you want.

Once your meeting is set up, the system e-mails the other attendees with your plans. They can propose new times and places. The whole back-and-forth is captured on your event's dedicated page. Once everyone buys in to the plans, attendees can pop the meeting into their calendar (Outlook, iCal, Yahoo, or Google).

I found setting up test meetings in Presdo quite easy and almost fun. But I'm also left scratching my head. Presdo, at the moment, doesn't give you any real insight into when it would be good for you or anyone else to meet, meaning the thorniest part of setting up a meeting--choosing a time--is still completely manual. Nor does the clever location finder link in to a service like OpenTable for restaurants or Fandango for movie tickets. And the natural-language starting gate for Presdo is cute, but it's not smart enough to obviate the need for you to carefully check its work on the event page that it creates once you type your plain text.

I like the idea of new, pure interface for scheduling meetings. And Presdo does do a nice job of keeping your e-mail free of hard-to-follow messages about meetings. But I want much better integration into other calendar-related services before I start to use it.

See also: IWantSandy and ReQall (review)

Tungle, launching today, may be the meeting coordination utility to beat. Like TimeBridge, Jiffle, and other products in this new category, it lets you block off a bunch of times for a meeting you want to have with a person or group of people, and then it handles all the back-and-forth while your attendees figure out which of the available times they want to grab. Once the meeting is booked, it enters the appointment into your Outlook calendar and sends the recipients calendar entries, too.

Tungle's success is in its design. If you're setting up a meeting, you can select whole swaths of potential times, even if you just want the person on the other end to pick a 30 minute slot. You can also do cool things such as drag blocks across days (for example, 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. on Wednesday through Friday) for open times. Tungle will excise times that you've already got booked (including times booked by other attendees on your Exchange server), and will make sure that your contact never gets the option to select times that are taken, even if they're scheduled after you send out the initial meeting request.

Tungle lets you create big blocks of potential times for meetings, but it won't double-book you.

Another unique feature: The capability to schedule two people into a meeting but not yourself--great for administrators. And you still get a confirmation when the meeting is set up.

When a meeting is finally locked in, the person or people you've scheduled get confirmation e-mails, and in the e-mails come calendar entries that auto-populate Outlook, Google Calendar, Entourage, and other scheduling systems.

Tungle lets you give some of your contacts access to your free/busy information so they can more easily initiate a meeting request with you. For people you'd rather keep at a more professional distance, you don't have to share anything about your schedule except episodically, when you want to set up a meeting with them.

It appears easy to use and mostly straightforward. I'm looking forward to giving it a shot. Unfortunately, I couldn't get the desktop application to run on my system. Outlook is a "finicky platform" Tungle CEO Marc Gingras told me before I fired up the demo on my own PC. Prophetic words. My cursed laptop also rejects TimeBridge, by the way. I don't know what it is that keeps scheduling helpers from running well on my computers.

For people setting up meetings, Tungle is Outlook-only so far. But as I said, it sends confirmation e-mails to attendees that many calendar applications can read.

Tungle is free. Premium services (such as scheduling meeting rooms) will be available eventually. The company also plans to make money by linking to third parties such as conference bridges.

Once we can get these applications stable on a PC, we'll compare them.

I'm ready.

Here's a creepy site that is based on a sound idea: JustInCaseIDie. On this service you can set up a message to be sent to a single recipient if you don't check in by a certain time or reply to a reminder e-mail. The idea is that, if you die, you can't check in, and your canned message will be sent. Said message could be a posthumous love note, a terrible expose, the combination to the safe in the house, and so on.

It's implemented in a pretty lightweight fashion, so I can't imagine it being used for anything serious. Potential users need to know that it works on London time only. That may be important if you're planning a check-in from a different time zone. And what if there's an e-mail hiccup? What if you're not dead, but just on vacation and not checking e-mail (and forgot you have a JustInCaseIDie trigger set)? You could easily have "Hello, I'm dead," e-mails going out that you didn't intend.

But the idea of a Web-based dead-man's switch is sound, and I'm surprised there aren't more travel or dating sites implementing a variation of this. When we're overdue to arrive at a destination (or home), it might be good to tell people where we thought we'd be. A delay could just be a late flight or a good date. Or it could be worse. But conditional alerts to our family or friends could prevent little scheduling hiccups from becoming bigger deals. All, hopefully, falling far short of actual death.

See also:
A Webware challenge: Make cell phones better lifelines
Safety Trip Plan: If I'm not back by 9 p.m., call the cops.

The meeting time negotiation service TimeBridge is adding a new Web-based component today. It now lets you set up a page, which TimeBridge hosts, that displays your free times. People who want a piece of your schedule can request an available time from those that are open. It's a good improvement to TimeBridge for service providers like consultants.

Previously, all of TimeBridge's scheduling communications were in e-mails. See review: TimeBridge makes scheduling easy.

Now anyone can see what a slacker you are.

As before, TimeBridge gets its free/busy data from your Outlook or Google calendar; if you're a user of one of these products, you don't need to adopt a new basic scheduling system to use the TimeBridge meeting negotiation service.

It doesn't look like the new hosted schedule is embeddable in Web pages or on social network sites as a widget, though. If I was a consultant using TimeBridge to let my customers book time with me, I would prefer it if they didn't have to leave my site to do so.

I've used TimeBridge on and off since November 2006, and I've found that the plug-in for Outlook has a conflict with the McAfee virus scanner that CNET installs on our machines. But the service is so potentially valuable to me that I've tried three different versions of the software hoping it'd be fixed.

Previously, TimeBridge added a free conference calling service, a nice and natural add-on to a meeting coordination product.

See also: Timedriver, Jiffle (formerly iPolipo; review), ScheduleOnce (review), and Ether (review).