Mee-tiff-eye-er

During some usability testing we noticed users were having trouble pronouncing our name.  So now every time you hover over our logo we give you a little help!

Getting Started Is Even Easier

We've made a few changes recently to make it even easier to get your friends together.  When creating a new event we now ask if you already know when your event is happening or if you need help picking the best time.

Even though Meetifyr was originally created to help people find the best time to meet with friends we noticed it was also being used to see who was available for events on specific days.

We then ask for the date or date range the calendar needs to cover, previously we just assumed the next four weeks - but it turns out this assumption was rarely correct!

We hope these changes will make it even easier to get started with Meetifyr especially for new users.

Let us know what you think

We've given the Meetifyr homepage a bit of a redesign and as a part of that we've added a Facebook Like button - so if you like Meetifyr we'd really appreciate if you click it!

It's just as important for us to know if you don't like our site, if there's something you'd like to tell us about please, please let you know by email or visit our feedback forum.

Thanks for using Meetifyr!

Now with Facebook invites

We've made it even easier for you to invite friends to a meet up with Facebook invites.  Now from any event page you can get a list of all your Facebook friends and select the ones you want to invite your event.

Just click the Facebook login button to get started.

Once you've select your friends and clicked Send Requests, all those friends will receive a notification through Facebook asking if they want to get involved in your event with and a click of a button will bring them to your event in Meetifyr.

Realtime Updates and Timeline

Previously with Meetifyr when an event was updated anyone else looking at that event wouldn’t see the update until they refreshed their browser. This is fine with only one person updating an event but not so great if multiple people are using it.
With this latest update to Meetifyr we’ve added realtime updates, if several people have an event open and one of them makes an update, everyone will see that update instantly without refreshing the page. This also works with comments which makes them into a more real-time chat, great for when you’re trying to organise something!

To make it obvious when an event is updated and to give a clear overview of what’s gone on we’re replaced the Chat and When’s Best tabs with a single Timeline area which combines updates to an event with any comments. This updates in real-time and is a great place to look to see what’s changed since you last looked at an event.

These changes, especially the real-time updates, were quite technical so watch this space for a follow up post on how we did this with the Google App Engine and their Channel API.

New Feature | Best day pointers

There's been an area on Meetifyr for a while which shows the days for your meetup.  This was a little hidden out the way, behind the comments section, so today we've put three little pointers which show the top three most suitable days for your meetup based on everyone's availability.

As days get selected as unavailable or preferred the pointers bounce around to keep track of which days suit people best.  And if you need to choose between the 1st, 2nd and 3rd choice, well that's what the comments are for!

Meetifyr 2.0!

Today we’re very excited to annouce the launch of a redesigned Meetifyr!

After working away behind closed doors for months its time to show our new look to our most honest critics, you. 

We continue with our aim of being the simplest way for friends to arrange to meet up. There’s still no logins, passwords or email addresses to remember just a simple page where you and your friends can share just the information you need to make that meet up happen.

A little under a year ago Meetifyr launched and since then we’ve been steadily improving the site while a dedicated number of people have come to rely on our service. We hope the design changes we’ve made today will help make Meetifyr more enjoyable to use and open it out to an even wider audience.

This is just the first step of a long process to improve Meetifyr so any feedback, good or bad, is most welcome.  Thanks!

New Feature | Finding the Best Time To Meet

Meetifyr is great for gathering together people's availability but sometimes its difficult to tell which days suit everyone best, especially when there's lots of people involved.
To tackle this we've introduced a new feature today which sorts all the available days by the most appropriate.

As selections change the list updates to show which day suits everyone based on when people are busy and which days they prefer.

New Look Comments

We thought the comments on Meetifyr were looking a bit plain so we've made quick change to make them look more appealing.
We're pretty pleased with how it turned out so we might look at applying this effect of giving depth to elements elsewhere.  Watch this space!

Getting Started is Even Easier

We've been looking at ways to make getting started with Meetifyr even easier, so today we've added a new check list for new events.
Its just a list of the main thinks to do when creating an event which get ticked off once they're done.

Updated Homepage

We've made a couple of small changes to our homepage today.  Firstly to incorporate more of the good press we're getting and also to try and spell more clearly what Meetifyr is about - Getting Your Friends Together!

New Feature | Maps

We've made a few changes at Meetifyr, cleaning up the interface to make it even easier to use and also throwing in a couple of new features for good measure.

The main addition is the introduction of maps to the event page, you can now add a map and place a marker to show everyone where you're meeting up.  Like anything on the event page the map can be updated by anyone or removed if not required.

We've also added a description field which can be used to provide any extra information about your event.

Evolution of a Web App

As much for the sake of posterity I wanted to show how the event page in Meetifyr has evolved since its launch in Feburary 2010.  
So here are some screenshots of our example calendar as viewed by successive versions of the app - enjoy!
(I'll be keeping this post updated so don't forget to check back)

Version  1 (15th February 2010)

Version  9 (27th February 2010)

Version  17 (17th May 2010)

Version  19 (25th May 2010)

Version  20 (3rd June 2010)

Version  27 (26th September 2010)

Version  29 (16th October 2010)

Version  37 (20th December 2010)

Version 39 (26th January 2011)

The homepage at Meetifyr.com hasn't changed quite as much but here are the main revisions its gone through.

Homepage version 1

Homepage version 19

Homepage version 29

Homepage version 37

Twitter

Starting to use Twitter for thoughts on Meetifyr, follow us at:

@meetifyrdotcom

New Feature | Times!

It's been our most requested feature and a long time coming so today we're delighted to announce that you can now specify times of the day to meet rather just individual days.

It incredibility simple to use, just click 'add a time' then either select one of the listed times or enter your own.  Once a time has been set there's a few options to help manage times across all days.  You can copy the selected time across all days, remove the selected time or remove all times for the calendar.

There's also an option to add another time for a particular day, this allows you to have multiple occurrence of the same day but at different times.

New Feature | Individual Day Selection

Previously in Meetifyr you selected a date range within which to meet then narrowed it down by which days of the week you'd like to try and meet on.  This was fine when you wanted to meet "on a weekend in the next 4 weeks" or "a Wednesday, Thursday or Friday sometime next month" but not so great when only specific days in specific weeks are good i.e. "on Monday or Tuesday this week or Wednesday or Thursday or Friday next week".

So today we've introduced a new feature which allows you to show or hide any specific day within the available date range.  Its incredibility simple to use, just click the << link in the top right-hand corner of an available date to hide it or click the >> link at the top of a hidden date to make it available again, what could be simpler!

Speed Improvements

We've been very busy behind the scenes of Meetifyr making changes to how events are stored.  The reason for these changes was to give us more flexibility in how events are structured so that we can move forward with features we know users are waiting for. 

One fortunate side effect of the changes is that there's a noticeable speed increase across the site due to us making better use of Google App Engine's data storage, which can only be a good thing!

So with that work behind us we can continue adding features and strive to make Meetifyr the easiest way for friends to arrange a meetup.

New Help Page

We've added  a new help page to Meetifyr today, it's basically a quick start guide to setting up an event.  Meetifyr is still pretty simple so as you can image the guide is quite short!

We've also made a few subtle changes to the main calendar page, the Free/Busy selectors now fill more of thier cells which we hope will break up the white space and make it easier to see what's happening at a glance.

New Feature | Comments

Today we've added a new feature, Comments, anyone can now add comments to any calendar on Meetifyr.  The idea is to give all the people involved in a meetup somewhere to make notes or share a discussion, maybe discuss which bar you're going to or say what time you're going to arrive.

To add a comment you just need to click your name in the list of people attending and enter what you want to say.  Once you've clicked your name we remember who you are so the next time you view that calendar you'll already be selected.

This also means we know when someone re-visits a calendar, which we hope to build new personalised features with, like 'Show me everything that's changed since I last visited' or 'Link my availability across calendars'.  

As ever, if you have any ideas for new features or things you'd like to see Meetifyr do then please let us know.

New Feature | Where

One of the first feature requests we got after the launch of Meetifyr was to add a 'Where' field alongside the 'Why', 'When' and 'Who'.  Its such an obvious request I've no idea why we haven't added it sooner.  Anyway here it is, pretty self explanatory.

We also took this opportunity to make a few teaks to the design hopefully making things a bit cleaner and more consistent.