Tungle. Your Meetings Scheduled, Published and Shared

Do you Tungle? If you tungle, you can quickly and easily sett up a meeting with as many folks as you want in less than a minute. Imagine this scenario. You need to arrange a meeting with a group of friends, clients or colleagues but its kind of difficult because they are not at their desks or somewhere convenient right now to make a date. What's more, there is more than two of them, so you'll have to try to organize a time that everyone can meet. Janet says she can meet on Friday night but not Saturday morning. Joe says Saturday morning is okay but he'll have to check his schedule. You have Friday night and Saturday morning free but you actually are crossing your fingers to squeeze the meeting on Thursday night but you don't know if Janet or Joe can make it. It's too confusing! Sure, I could use Google Calendar but I'd have to ding-dong between gCal, gMail and perhaps my phone before we can settle on a date!

I've been trying out a few services that could solve my problem and Tungle has come closest to what I need as a calendar accelerator to help me and all my contacts make appointments to meet with the least amount of hassle. Firstly, its got to be able to synchronize with Google Calendar (and Outlook and iCal* for all my other buddies) because that's where all my dates are. Secondly, I'd like not to go back and forth on my application, cut a number of steps to the process and just get it down pat y'know? And thirdly, its got to be easy as pie for everyone one to use from one to one-hundred - whether or not they use the service. Last but not least, its got to be free because that's the real meaning of 'getting things done'. I can use my time and money for other things.

How does Tungle work?
I want to schedule a meeting with my mates Ruben and Casper. I hit up the Schedule Meeting, invite Ruben and Casper to the meeting by typing in Casper's name and selecting Ruben from my contacts list since it syncs with my contacts on Google. My calendar syncs with Tungle so I can see which times work best for me and I select the times I am available this week to meet up. We haven't said when we're actually meeting yet - just showing each other when we have open slots and proposing a few possibilties.

Casper is not on Tungle's service but he'll get the email invitations in his inbox like regular mail with the link to visually view my proposed times. Casper is in New Zealand and in a different time zone but that's not a problem because Tungle works it out and adjusts the time for us. He gets the mail on his iPhone, picks the times that will work for him and clicks 'Book Meeting'. Now we have a semblance of a plan. Ruben uses iCal and Tungle too. He can log in to view the calendar that I have made public. My calendar overlays on his so he can see exactly when our times coincide and clicks in when he can meet too. Looks like we can all meet on Friday evening.

But let's say, before the email was out to book our meeting, I made an appointment that overlapped on one of the proposed times that I thought I would be free. Tungle dynamically updates the invitation and booking slots as it syncs the changes I make in Google Calendar. If the meeting coincides with something on my calendar, I can trust Tungle to send me a reminder that I have something already scheduled during that slot. Thank goodness I won't be double-booked! Casper and Ruben can see the changes too and propose to book the meeting on my other available slots. Once that is done, all of us get an email saying the times are booked to confirm the meeting. When I click confirm, it shows up on my Google Calendar. Just like that!

All that's left is to show up at the meeting!

What I really like about Tungle is that it plays really well with Google. It's easy enough to install the gadget and you can put a gadget where all your action and communication happens - on Google Calendar and Gmail. So, when you get a query for a meeting in your inbox, you can just click on the Tungle button and tungle a meeting with everyone.

*Tungle also works with Entourage, Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, Xing, Ning and almost Lotus notes.