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.
February 9th, 2010 at 10:39 am
Hi, I’m a teacher and there was an article about this site in a recent NJEA article but you don’t explain how to use it and there’s no way to contact anyone. Very strange. Can you voice record here or is it all 140 word tweets? I’m trying to decide if it will be useful. I’d really appreciate a reply.
February 10th, 2010 at 6:54 pm
I am a teacher also, at a middle school. I teach 6th grade reading to struggling readers. I am planning on trying todaysmeet this Friday with one small group. I have some vocab sets uploaded on quizlet that I want them to practice, and I am planning on having them use todaysmeet to let me know their scores as they finish each round and any comments they have. It’s always fun working with them — I see how this goes. I am lucky in that I have a small class to experiment with before I go “live” with my big classes. LOL
February 14th, 2010 at 9:38 pm
Well I went live and lived to tell the tale. My biggest question is “Is there any way to delete comments?” I had one student who would send every comment 5 times. Plus the silly chatter. I am glad that I set the room up to expire in one week.
February 19th, 2010 at 8:37 am
I can clearly understand not being able to do SMS text messaging with Today’s Meet.
What would add a lot of value is a MOBILE FORMAT. Today’s Meet works with iPhone, Droid and Blackberry but the layout makes it a little awkward to work with.
February 20th, 2010 at 5:32 pm
@Karen:
Short answer: no. I’ve avoided features that would require someone to “own” the room because they would require that person to have an account (or some other identification) and I’ve been focusing on simplicity.
@Roderick:
I totally agree. Using TodaysMeet on a mobile is not as good as it could be. Improving that experience is on my road map.
February 21st, 2010 at 9:45 am
By the way the app rocks.
February 27th, 2010 at 10:27 am
It would make a huge difference, both for mobile usage and for ease-of-use on desktops, if we could customize the text size, perhaps choose from a couple of templates.
–on my MacBook, the comment text is too large, so only a couple of comments fit on the screen, so the comments fall off the screen before I can look down to see them. If I have to spend time scrolling down to “catch up,” usefulness drops off exponentially.
–on my iPhone, it looks about right, except that the name text is so much smaller than the comment text, it’s almost unreadable.
Both problems are solved if the person setting up the meeting can choose slightly smaller comment text and slightly larger name text.
Thanks. Great idea, and really useful!