News.
Mobile Phones and TodaysMeet
The second most-requested feature of TodaysMeet is better mobile phone integration, specifically sending a text message to a room. Unfortunately, I’ll probably never be able to do this for two reasons.
First, SMS short codes are prohibitively expensive. TodaysMeet, as you may have noticed, has no advertising, and no other source of revenue*. That might change eventually—I won’t add advertising—but I have no real plans to do so right now.
Second, I’m very unhappy with the possible options for interacting with a room via text message:
- One-way, where you can text in but not hear what’s going on. This doesn’t encourage conversation, thus missing the point of TodaysMeet entirely.
- Two-way, where I send every message in a room back to the phone. Imagine getting dozens, if not hundreds (the average room has nearly 500 messages right now) of text messages on your phone in an hour or two. It’s extremely difficult to keep up with them, and could end up costing a lot for some users. In short, it’s not a good experience.
I do plan to make the site more mobile-friendly, but text-messaging is just not going to provide the kind of experience I want for TodaysMeet.
* TodaysMeet is fairly cheap for me to run right now—not free, but cheap. But it is just me, and it’s not a paying gig. If it seems like updates and fixes come slowly at times, this is why. If I were to attempt to create revenue from TodaysMeet, it would be from value-added features. I would not use advertising and I would not take away the free functionality that exists now.
TodaysMeet meets Twitter
Three changes went live tonight.
TodaysMeet finally met Twitter
There’s a new option when you create a room. You can optionally add a hash tag, and TodaysMeet will go search Twitter and pull in tweets tagged with it. This happens in very-near realtime, so it should feel pretty seamless.
I’m very interested to hear your feedback on this feature. Love it? Hate it? Confusing? Broken? Leave a comment!
Today’s Meet => TodaysMeet
I dropped the apostrophe. It looked weird. I’ll be trying to make sure that I’m consistent everywhere. If you’re going to write about TodaysMeet, I’d appreciate it if you could use this new spelling.
New Server
This server has been ready for a couple of months, but I got lazybusy.Yeah, busy. TodaysMeet had always been hosted on a server I typically use for experiments and new sites. Now it’s on its own. This should really improve uptime.
Again, if you notice any issues, please let me know.
I hope you enjoy the Twitter integration. I’ll continue to tinker with the site over the weekend. You can always check status.todaysmeet.com for faster updates.
Service Status Updates
Those of you following TodaysMeet on Twitter may have seen a few tweets today about a styling but in Internet Explorer 8. This seems like as good a time as any to bring a new tool to your attention: Today’s Meet Service Status.
This very simple site contains short status updates, and has an RSS feed, should you need it.
I’ll be using this to post updates on the Today’s Meet service when I’m either in a place where I can’t write a full blog post, or when I’d rather concentrate on fixing the issue and explain it later. It will be the first, best place to look during outages, both planned and unplanned. Both the status feed and this blog now run on a server separate from Today’s Meet itself,
Eventually, I may configure the status updates to cross post to Twitter, but for now you’ll just have to subscribe to the feed.
For those of you interested in the details of the bug, follow me below the break. read more…
Unscheduled Downtime
There was some unscheduled downtime last night and this morning. The technical story is a corrupt database table. The human story is that people were unable to use Today’s Meet for several hours, because it, unfortunately, happened while I was asleep.
I want to apologize to anyone who was affected by this. While I can never guarantee 100% uptime, it’s still my job to provide as stable and reliable a platform as I can, and when that fails, I take it personally. I’m sorry.
If your room is missing any data, please let me know as soon as possible, through email or Twitter. My rolling backups go for a few days, but sooner is better.
The timing is lousy, because I’m starting a cross country move tomorrow, but when I land (probably about three weeks) there are some new monitoring methods I want to integrate, to catch, report and try to fix, more obscure cases like this automatically. Third party uptime monitoring only notices the most egregious errors, like whole-server crashes. Even local monitoring with tools like monit wasn’t fine-grained enough to catch this. That means it’s time to look at custom solutions.
But, as I said, I’m moving, so it will be a little while. I will make sure everything stays up and running. These problems have been pretty rare. Hopefully nothing happens while I’m driving through Nebraska!
Feature Requests
The most frequently requested feature, by far, is a transcript of a room: a chronological, decently formatted review of what happened. I am planning on doing this, and have been for a while. But, I’ve been busy lately, and, if you didn’t know, Today’s Meet is just me.
Another great suggestion I had was shorter, classroom-based room lengths. I’ll probably be adding 8- and 2-hour expiration timers at the same time I add the transcripts, if not before.
So, for you readers, I have two questions:
1. What formats should be available for the transcripts? I want something someone can save to their hard drive as a single file, so I’m thinking along the lines of plain text and plain HTML (with abusive semantics, but not requiring stylesheets or images). Possibly RTF if it’s not too much trouble?
2. What other features would you like to see?
There are two features I do not plan to implement, or at least not without some other drastic changes. Deleting or clearing a room and extending a room’s “lease”. Deleting or clearing a room would require some type of user authentication—I don’t want just anyone to be able to do it—and extending a lease sort of defeats the purpose. I may add “infinite” rooms as some sort of premium or special deal in the future, but for now, it’s not happening. I think the ephemeral rooms are what sets Today’s Meet apart from the competition.
Given a little time, I’ll get to work on Today’s Meet. For now, let me know how it’s working, and what else you’d like to see!
You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
A few weeks ago, visitors to Today’s Meet were greeted, not with the regular interface, but with a cryptic message warning that it was, in fact, very dark. They were likely to be eaten by a grue.
I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the Zork games? No? It doesn’t really matter.
The issue was caused by the database server. Specifically, it wasn’t running: MySQL failed to start with the system after a routine weekly restart.
Unfortunately, the monitoring I had in place at the time only checked that there was a response from the web server, since the database had been 100% reliable until that incident. The new monitoring checks the database server directly.
More unfortunately, there seems to have been some data loss at the time, which wasn’t noticed until more recently. I deeply apologize to those affected by the data loss. I know what a blow that can be. I have extended the life of my rolling database backups to provide more insulation against this type of thing.
I hope this will not happen again, and I hope that this transparency is appreciated, and that you will continue to use Today’s Meet.
Benefits of the Backchannel
Olivia Mitchell (@OliviaMitchell) wrote a great post about presenting with the backchannel.
As a presenter, you should read the whole thing, but here are some of the highlights:
Benefits to the Audience
- Helps the audience stay focused.
- The audience gets more content.
- The audience can participate.
Benefits for the Speaker
- The typing means you’re provoking interest.
- You’ll get immediate feedback.
- Your colleagues can answer questions for you.
Laura goes on to give great advice on how to manage and monitor the backchannel. Really a great read for anyone presenting these days.
And of course, if you use Today’s Meet to help manage and monitor it, that’s good, too.
Tweak to Room Names
Today’s Meet rooms are no longer case senstive. I originally intended this as a small privacy feature, but what I’ve seen is people getting confused and creating duplicate rooms, splitting up their group. So now http://todaysmeet.com/TodaysMeet and http://todaysmeet.com/todaysmeet will get you into the same room. read more…
A Few Ways to Use Today’s Meet
I had the great privilege today to sit in on a presentation and Q&A on Google Apps for Education. Shortly before it started, I set up a Today’s Meet room so we could have the back channel going and so a few people who couldn’t make it could still listen in.
It got me thinking about some of the ways Today’s Meet can be used. Of course, these are just my ideas. I hope you have different ones! read more…
New Server – Successful Test
Today’s Meet has made the move to a new web host and server. Some of you may have noticed a little downtime while the DNS change was propagating. Looking at usage, though, I doubt many people were affected. read more…
