Webware

On June 11, I added a clarification. See last paragraph.

My readers may know that I'm big fan of TimeBridge, a free service that makes it much easier to schedule meetings. It's not perfect, though. I like it a lot, but I find it confuses or annoys some of the people who get my TimeBridge invitations, even those who proposed meeting with me in the first place. So I'm always on the lookout for alternatives.

Here's one I recently got working: Tungle. It's a plug-in that is functionally similar to TimeBridge. You install the small app, connect it your Outlook client, and it then lets you propose multiple blocks of times for meetings with people, and it lets the recipients select the times that work best for them.

The company has also launched a new service, Tungle Click to Meet, which gives every user their own page on Tungle's service where they can send people to book meetings. There's a free/busy widget that goes along with it (for embedding in your own site or blog). I don't like opening up my calendar that much, but some service professionals might like to use these features with their existing online or software-based calendars.

For an Outlook user, Tungle is a little better than TimeBridge, for a few reasons. First, instead of requiring you to pick discrete blocks of time for your meetings, as TimeBridge does, Tungle lets you paint whole swaths of your calendar as available, and it lets attendees pick the best time for them inside those blocks. For example, if you select 1:00 to 5:00pm for a 30-minute meeting, an attendee can select 2:30. With TimeBridge, you'd have to create 8 different proposed half-hour meeting times to make that possible. Except you can't; TimeBridge only lets you earmark five options for each meeting.

Tungle lets you block out big chunks of time. It works alongside your Outlook calendar.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Tungle also doesn't clutter your Outlook calendar with tentative time slots you're reserved for meetings, which TimeBridge does. Personally, I like seeing on my Outlook calendar what's tentatively held for me by TimeBridge, but the Tungle view is neater.

Both TimeBridge and Tungle will also integrate with Google Calendar, and they don't require any downloads when you're syncing with Google. Both also have other options for sharing availability information. You can invite certain people to see your calendar whenever they want.

The best thing about Tungle, for me: I've been using it for a week and nobody I've been making meetings with has complained about it.

On the business side, however, I still think TimeBridge is the smarter company. Its scheduling service is free, but it sells online conference services, at a bargain rate when compared to Webex and GoToMeeting. Tungle is opting to go the straight paid route, and will eventually sell subscriptions to its scheduling service. The price hasn't been decided yet, but no matter what it is, I fear it will be too high. Solid schedule coordination services, like TimeBridge, are currently free and will probably remain so. Tungle may be slightly better, but I don't think it will be seen by potential customers as better enough to pay for.

Clarification added June 11: Tungle CEO Marc Gringas wrote to me to say, "What is available on Tungle today is free and will remain free. Later in 2010 we will be launching premium services that will target specific segments such as sales, HR and PR professionals."

See also:
Online-scheduling alternatives to Google Calendar
Tungle launches meeting time broker (2008)
MeetingMade (another schedule helper).

The meeting scheduling service Timebridge, which we first covered in 2006, has been upgraded recently with a somewhat better e-mail user interface and some important related services. And according to CEO Yori Nelken, the business model he set out to execute is actually working, even in this awful economy.

The thing that I didn't get at first, but Nelken clearly did, is that, "scheduling is our sales mechanism," as he says. The feature of the service that I like--Timebridge's capability to broker multiple proposed meeting times to multiple different people (for different meetings) all at once--is just the come-on. The business is the service's resale of online and phone meeting services.

Timebridge meetings can now instantly get their own dial-in conference bridge numbers, and Nelken's gets a cut of the call revenues. Timebridge is also selling relatively inexpensive subscriptions to an online screen-sharing service, the open-source DimDim (previous coverage), that competes with Webex and GoToMeeting. Timebridge's conferencing service is $8.95 a month, compared with $39 a month for either GoToMeeting or Webex.

I call this the "beyond freemium" business model since Timebridge isn't selling upgrades of its own technology product, as most freemium plans do, but rather services made by other companies.

Timebridge hooks you by managing meeting scheduling. It makes money by re-distributing phone bridge and online meetings services.

(Credit: Screenshot by Josh Lowensohn / CNET Networks)

And since Timebridge uses its scheduling service as a hook, Nelken says, it has essentially no customer acquisition fee. The other services have to advertise to get customers, and, he says, that costs them on average $130 for each new user.

Timebridge integrates well with Outlook. I use it and can vouch for it. It also works with Google Calendar and iCal, but I have not tried it on those apps.

Coming soon: Group collaboration and shared space features (see also: cc:Betty). The service has 300,000 users, Nelken says, and is growing 30 percent month-over-month.

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).

I wrote favorably about the idea of TimeBridge last year. It's a service that's supposed to make scheduling meetings less of pain in the neck, by letting an organizer send out several proposed times for a meeting, and then coordinating the replies of attendees until everyone agrees on a single time, at which point it will lock in the agreed-on time for everyone and release the tentative hold it had on the alternate spots.

TimeBridge e-mails options to the people you want to meet with.

The service is now in public beta (finally), and I've been using it to schedule meetings. The upshot: It works great.

What I like best about TimeBridge is its integration with Outlook. There's a very handy "Reply with TimeBridge" option that it adds to Outlook if you install the add-on. If someone sends you an e-mail about a meeting, you can use this option to transfer the discussion over to the TimeBridge system. Your recipient will get a link to a Web page, where it's easy to select one of the meeting times you propose. Or, if you instead start a conversation about a new meeting, TimeBridge reads your recently-used Outlook e-mail recipients to make entering in the recipient very easy. In ether case, TimeBridge syncs with your Outlook calendar and shows you the times you have available, which makes picking possible meetings slots easy.

You can grant a limited view of your calendar to people you meet with frequently.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Like the party planner MyPunchBowl (review), respondents can pick more than one time that works, and flag one as "best." The product also syncs with Google Calendar.

If there are people you meet with frequently, you can share your general availability with them, allowing them to propose meeting times when you're available. The system only shows when you have appointments booked, not with whom or where they are.

My small beefs with TimeBridge are these: First, from within Outlook it pops up Internet Explorer screens for its functions, even if your default browser is set to Firefox. Second, it doesn't let you assign more than one tentative meeting spot to a time block during the negotiation phase. This keeps things simple, but there are some meetings for which users might feel a musical chairs approach to scheduling would work. I'd like the option, at least.

TimeBridge will always be a free version, CEO Yori Nelken told me. Premium versions will be available with more features. Competitive service iPolipo (review), in contrast, has only a 30-day free trial, and it requires you to give up either a PayPal authorization or a credit card number to access it. That's cracked. Try TimeBridge.

I hate scheduling, especially with people not in my company. The back-and-forth e-mails and phone calls are maddening. I have eagerly tried many solutions to this hassle, none of which did what I needed, and I've been awaiting what I thought was the holy grail of time finders, TimeBridge, since I wrote it up last year.

TimeBridge is still in deep, dark, private beta, but there's another schedule helper that just popped up, iPolipo.

You can block times as open for new meetings.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

iPolipo integrates with Outlook. It knows what times you are available by synchronizing with your calendar, and then it lets you block open times as reserved for meetings yet to be set up. (Thankfully, it does not just assume that any open slots are available for meeting requests.) When you want to meet with a person, you send him or her an invite via the iPolipo plug-in, and they then get a link to a page that shows the times that you've marked as available to new meetings, and that haven't already been nabbed by other people.

You can set up different groups and block different times for them. The blocks can overlap. For example, say you're a professor. You can set 1:00 to 2:00 p.m. each Wednesday as available for meetings with other faculty, but 1:00 to 4:00 p.m. for students. When you send out a request for a meeting, you select which group the recipient is in. Or you can invite a person to have ongoing access to your calendar, and they can then request a meeting with you. They will only see the times available to the group that you've placed them in. Once someone requests a spot, and you confirm it, no one else can grab it.

I have not tried the service for setting up a meeting with more than two people.

Users see all the times you've marked as available to their group.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

I really like what iPolipo does, although I would not recommend the version I'm trying now. In order to invite someone, you have to type in their entire e-mail address, which is an annoying step in an e-mail plug-in. There are other minor usability snags as well. But a new version should be out Monday, which CEO Hari Shetty demoed to me today. It lets you easily attach an iPolipo meeting invitation to an ordinary e-mail that you compose in Outlook, and it has other welcome UI improvements and new features. It is definitely worth waiting for.

Be prepared to pay for this service, though. iPolipo starts at $99 a year after a 30-day free trial.

From the Web 2.0 Conference:

Most of us waste a lot of time trying to find times for meetings. Inside a company, Microsoft Outlook users (on Exchange servers) can see the times their coworkers are free and busy. It's a good start, but when we want to schedule a meeting with multiple people or meet with people outside our company, everything can quickly fall apart. TimeBridge is trying to solve this problem, with a system that handles the negotiation of finding meeting times.

(Credit: TimeBridge)

Like the ultrasimple Doodle, TimeBridge lets you set up multiple options for a meeting, and it lets attendees select the times that work best for them. But TimeBridge also lets you do more complex setup. For example, if you have two meetings to set up with several people in each and four slots that could potentially work for you, TimeBridge will send out, on your behalf, the available times that make sense, and it will update available times for everybody as people respond (via a Web form). It also integrates into Outlook and automatically promotes meeting times from "tentative" to "confirmed" as people sign up. Like Plaxo, which updates contact books, a lot of the negotiation happens behind the scenes if the parties on both ends use the product.

One of the really cool things about TimeBridge is that you can offer the same tentative meeting slots to different people and different meetings, and TimeBridge will keep everybody up to date and broker the times to make sure you don't double-book.

The service also lets meeting organizers set up a shared work space for meetings: a place where attendees can store notes and talk about the meeting agenda. I think that's a superfluous feature (that's what e-mail is good for), but the rest of the technology is just what we need. I can't wait to try it out.

There will be a free version, and the company is also considering paid and enterprise programs. The bad news: It's in private beta now and won't be generally available until 2007.