Home › Blogs › Merlin's blog ›

Open Thread: Doodle & your favorite simple web tools

Submitted by Merlin on October 13, 2006 - 9:50am.

Doodle: Scheduling meetings

This has been mentioned here before (just in comments, I think), but I have to repeat: I can’t say enough good things about Doodle. It takes the idiotically over-complicated problem of figuring out when all of n people are available to do something, and in the simplest way conceivable, polls all the participants to find the optimal time and date.

I’m always thrilled when colleagues send a meeting invite in the form of a Doodle email; it requires zero fiddling on my part and pleasantly skirts the need for the endless email threads that most people rely on to get a group of people extant in one time-space unit.

I’m risking the indignity of a double-post on an “old” link for a good reason: with all the foam and fuss over “Web 2.0,” and the ever higher (Ever! Higher!) technology we shovel to solve stupid human problems, it’s refreshing to see adoption of a tool that ends up being no more complicated than a white board with electrical-tape columns.

I wish stuff like Doodle would inspire more developers to start with the Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work. No Arial Rounded, no whizzy AJAX, and no angel-round-attracting gradients. Just a modest solution to a single dumb problem. That is a life hack, defined.

What’s your favorite idiotically simple web tool right now?

in

Nice tool! As far as...

Submitted by Matt (not verified) on October 15, 2006 - 4:15am.

Nice tool! As far as I can tell, the only problem with Doodle is that the dates and times are in European format. E.g., Date = 15-10-2006; Time = 18:00. I entered 2 as a possible meeting time and Doodle read it as 2 am. Couldn’t find a way to switch this, but then again I am know for being dense.

Hate to admit that I’ve sold my soul to Google, but I do like the Google homepage, especially the add-on to display incoming Gmail directly on the homepage. The Search History tracker is a little bit disturbing, but it’s also quite useful, since I can browse through my past searches and bookmark some of the sites that came up. This tool also makes me realize how obsessive I get about random topics at any given moment.