Transcript View

The transcript view is very much like the projector view (formerly called “read-only”) except for two important points.

• The transcript view is chronological, so it’s easier to read in order, and
• the transcript view does not update automatically.

To get to the transcript, look for the word “transcript” at the bottom of the Listen panel.

Short URLs

Every TodaysMeet room now has an automatic short URL associated with it, suitable for tweeting. These short URLs start with “today.io” and can be found at the bottom right of the Listen panel.

Thoughts?

If you’ve been using either of these new features, what do you think? What could be improved? If you haven’t, go try them out!

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 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.

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.

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!

Breaking Down the Physical Walls

Today’s presentation wasn’t publicized well in advance, so several people who wanted to be there couldn’t. But they could sure join our Today’s Meet room.

A few of us in the physical room were able to keep everyone in the virtual room up-to-date with the presentation, and even convey questions from some remote attendees and relay the answers back. We were able to grow the audience and bring in a lot more people.

Many-to-Many Live Blogging

Sometimes you want to send a tweet to the other attendees at the conference, but you know that most probably aren’t following you. Sure you can use hash tags, but they’d need to actively search for that.

With Today’s Meet, everyone, whether they’re followers on Twitter, friends on Facebook, or total strangers, can be in the same room, and get the whole audience. You’ll probably even find some new followers in the room.

At the same time, if we clue our Twitter followers in, even those who aren’t physically there can join in the discussion.

Opening the Back Channel

The discussions I’ve already seen on Today’s Meet have gone beyond the conversation in the physical room to adapt, extend, and compliment the discussion. Simple questions get answered by other attendees. Complex questions generate parallel discussion. Ideas flow between the physical and virtual rooms.

Instant Town Hall Moderator

If you’ve got a big name coming to talk, you might want to be sure the best questions get asked. Sure you could think of questions ahead of time, but those can’t respond to the presentation.

Instead, have a designated moderator (a teacher, an executive) look reading through the Today’s Meet room to find the people who are asking the best questions, and point them out when it’s time for Q&A.

Bring out the Shy Guys

Public speaking is scarier than death.

Typing a short message is much less frightening.

How many questions don’t get asked by people who would rather keep quiet? Today’s Meet can provide an opportunity for people who otherwise might not get the chance.

Have a Quick Convo

Need to get 3 or 4 or 5 (or 100 or 200) people together to chat for 5 minutes? If the start-up time of getting everyone together is longer than the meeting, why not just get everyone in a virtual room. Set it up to expire soon, and really hash out where to meet for lunch.

What Else?

Today’s Meet is a tool, and it’s a flexible tool. There are no rules (well, ok, there’s the ToS) about using a tool. What can you do with it?

I’m also happy to report that Today’s Meet was used live in a university classroom this week. Hello to any MSU students who make it here.

The results have given me some good things to think about and rearranged some of my development priorities. But on the whole, the users—who were not, in general, experienced social media users—seemed to pick up the idea quickly, and jumped right in to having real conversations about the material.

Of course, they also ran into the same problem Twitter users have during presentations: If you spend too much time reading, you miss the talk; if you spend too much time listening, you can miss the side conversations.

It’s a balancing act, and social media power users have had a little head start on learning to walk the line. It’s great to see people in education jump on the wagon, too.

What is Today’s Meet? Why do we need another micro-messaging service? Why does Today’s Meet look suspiciously like Drop.io?

All questions I asked myself while building Today’s Meet, so I figure someone else might want to know, too.

What is Today’s Meet?

More and more, Twitter is being used at conferences of the social media savvy. (So much that there’s already backlash.) People tweet from the conference floor, their followers can get an overview of the conference experience. Sometimes people even tweet about the presentation or panel their watching.

It’s become so common, in fact, that people have asked for questions during the presentation to be tweeted to them, via DM, @-replies, or #hashtags.

But Twitter isn’t always appropriate for this, for a few reasons. Some people don’t want to annoy their followers with messages that don’t have their context. Most likely, everyone in the room is not following everyone else, so only the speaker will see everything. And in a lot of situations, your audience isn’t on Twitter.

Today’s Meet exists to address some of that. Your audience doesn’t need to have an account or fancy software: they just need to go to a URL you create ahead of time. (In fact, you don’t even need an account. Just go to http://todaysmeet.com/YOUR_ROOM_NAME and you can set it up.) Messages go to everyone in the room—and no one else, it’s purely opt-in.

The room, the transcript, is available until it’s not. You set an expiration date when you create the room.

And there’s a “read-only” version for presenters, projectors, or anyone else who just wants to hear everyone else.

The two features I want to address first are private rooms—rooms where you need a password to get in—and mobile support. (The Ajax-driven interface breaks on my Blackberry, very embarassing.)

So, why do we need another micro-messaging service?

Twitter has shortcomings. There are the ones I just mentioned and a few others, like trying to have a 3-way conversation where 40% of each tweet is taken up by “@joetheplumber @sarahcuda”.

In most situations, Twitter is great. In some, it’s not.

Today’s Meet also has a very low start-up cost. No accounts, no signing up, no profile to fill in, no private information to give away. For non-Twitter audiences, Today’s Meet can be a great introduction to social messaging and maybe even a stepping stone to Twitter and more.

Why does Today’s Meet look so much like Drop.io?

Frankly, I like how Drop.io looks. The UI is very clean and clear and focused on what you’re there to do.

My goal for Today’s Meet was to get a clean, clear, and focused UI. So I borrowed liberally from Drop.io. I hope they consider it a form of flattery.

I’m sure Today’s Meet will evolve and find its own path in the future. For the present, it was nice to lay out a simple design and then focus on the underlying application.

Check it out.

Head back to Today’s Meet and give it a shot.

Try talking to your audience, or having a quick conversation with a few people, or anything else. If you think of more uses, leave a comment!

And check back here for updates about the service, like new features or the API (which I want to open soon).