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).

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 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.

Zapproved is a fairly new and very straightforward Web app for collecting approvals. Say you have a brilliant idea at work but need your boss, and the head of marketing, and a salesperson to commit to it before it has a chance of success. You might be able get these people to verbally express enthusiasm, or respond to an e-mail proposal in the affirmative, but these approvals can be tenuous. Worse, the marketing guy may actually be withholding concrete approval, but (you know how these things are) not telling you.

Zapproved pins people down. You create a proposal on the Zapproved site, and it sends it to the people you indicate. Their options are Approve, Deny, or Comment. You--and everyone else--can see who's holding up the decision that you want to be made. It's that transparency that Zapproved CEO Monica Enand can help move decisions along, by shaming the laggards into making the call one way or the other.

You'd be a fool to say no.

The system also records approvals and collects attachments on approval e-mails; these work as audit trails of decision making and can serve as institutional memory for a company.

While the person setting up a decision process needs to use the Zapproved site to kick things off, the approvers don't need the site at all. They just get HTML e-mails with embedded Approve and Deny buttons in them. And that model is why this concept can work. Like Evite for event invitations, and TimeBridge for meeting time brokering, there's Web 2.0 goodness for everyone, even the people who respond without registering on the Web site. Of course, each approval request has a link to Zapproved on it, which spreads the word about the app. In contrast, many other (good) workflow services, like BaseCamp, require all participants to use the Web service and be registered on it.

Speaking of non-Web access to Zapproved, Enand also said her team is working on mobile versions, speech-to-text approvals, even a fax interface for when you want to get sign-off from a client who's not computer-literate. Enterprises that want their own installation of Zapproved may eventually be able to pay for a version they can install on their systems. For now, the entire system is hosted by Zapproved and is free to all.

I have a project here I've been trying to get off the ground for a year; it keeps getting attention and enthusiasm only to stall before it gets the resources it needs. I'm going to give Zapproved a shot and see if it helps. In a corporate setting, it can take only one person to kill a good project. I'm hoping this app will help me find that person.

See also: Zapproved: A Lightweight Decision Making App (ReadWriteWeb).

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).

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.

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).

TimeDriver is a service for appointment management. I have a deep interest in this category of apps, since coordinating the scheduling of demos and interviews is one of the least pleasant parts of my job. In the good old days, I had an assistant for this.

TimeDriver lets its users set up a "schedule now" button on their Web site or in e-mails. Pressing the button lets the other party see only the times that the user has made available, and it makes sure appointments are not double-booked. It coordinates the user's available times with his or her Outlook or Google calendar.

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

TimeDriver is launching today at DEMO 08.

Pick a time, any time.