Introducing appointment slots in Google Calendar | Hacker News Reader

Introducing appointment slots in Google Calendar

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134 pointspushingbits13 comments

Anyone know of any startups doing anything big with calendars of late? I feel like they could handily outpace Google Calendar, which has rolled out very few updates over the past few years.

I still use Google Calendar because it's the best (and just about the only) free, web-based offering, but I'd love to hear about alternatives.

I've been using tungle.me to schedule meetings for a while now, and it's a decent service. But the biggest problem is that it requires people who book time with me to click on an email verification link before they can request a meeting.

That makes for a really poor UX for them, so I'll definitely be interested to see how Google's new appointment slots work.

A nice alternative could be to use when2meet.com, which has a great UI for inputting time you're available, though it's doesn't calculate the optimal meeting time for you if the meeting happens to involve a lot of people.

Also, Tungle.me got bought by RIM, so I'm not sure how much active work they'll be putting into non-RIM device support (for the calendar owner...of course device support across bookers is still valuable).

There's http://Doodle.com, a service that helps groups schedule meetings by letting each person vote on particular time slot. They've been around since 2007, according to their About page, though they haven't made many updates to their service.

I use Google Calendar's event scheduling feature a lot, because I often need to schedule group meetings. But when the participants I need to invite don't have a Google account, I use Doodle.com, because it has a free version that doesn't require everyone to register with it (low barrier to entry).

Tungle.me is pretty cool although I never ended up using it.

http://www.tungle.me/Home/

I was going to make a meeting/appointment startup a few months ago and eventually gave up when I found out about when2meet.com, which offered much of same functionality minus a some features and a nice UI. I outlined the project at http://oftn.org/projects/schedutron/ if you're interested.

You should just go ahead and build it anyway. If you do a good job, competition won't matter that much. I have customers in a space with thousands of competitors (event management software).

This is a direct stab at a bunch of offerings out there: GenBook, BookFresh, Appointment-Plus, etc.

Of course this won't have enough features to compete with all the products, but for a SMB with relatively low number of employees it's quite possible than they go to Google first.

Nice, YC could use this for booking office hours.

I think this feature has been long since over due in Google calendar and i'm pretty excited to give it a whirl.... still waiting on android calendar API support from Google. :/

I would check out OHours, its actually been a pretty neat way to to set up office hours for myself and allow others to sign up and come meet me. http://ohours.org/

I hope they add an easy-to-remember URL too, like google.com/calendar/username. That's one of the features I like out of the other appointment scheduling apps.

Has anyone seen whether or not the API will be updated to use this?

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