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.
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!
