Ok, enough foreplay, just go to the site. Do it. Actually go to www.meetifyr.com/example. You’ll notice two things:

• It’s sexy as hell. Yep, I said it. Those little toggles are hot. I wish I could get one of them in a polka dot bikini. And so clean and simple. Less is more.
• It is sooooooo slow. Too slow for me to add enough “o”‘s there to make this realistic. It is so slow that you could watch all of Star Trek (the new one, not the old one, but the slug that they used in Wrath of Kahn is still in it, SWEET!). You know how you just got excited about how cool Star Trek is? Take that positive feeling, multiply it by ten, and then make it negative. That’s how bad it feels to have this be so slow.

So, see how that was an unordered list? Yes, I purposefully used <ul> instead of <ol>, I do know how HTML works. I made it unordered because I don’t know what order you’ll find out about those two things. I found the example they put there to be really fast and great, I thought this site was awesome. Then I actually started testing it out with my own event. Oh. My. God. Shoot me now. I spent about two hours talking to a couple people and annoying my wife making her click a link that never ever ever loaded (for the record, on a website, never ever ever actually equals about 45 seconds). That’s only the first of about twenty annoying things about this site.

Because I really do love what this site is all about I’m going to talk about the positives first. Like I said, it looks great. It is so simple and easy to use. When I am looking for a new web app there are only two things I want, and I want the app to do one of them amazingly. I either want to connect all my other apps or I want it to do its own thing really really cleanly. If I could get Facebook but without all the **** useless apps (that was a curse word, if this blog wasn’t family friendly I would string together twelve provocative and illustrious curse words about facebook apps, they are a plague brought on by the devil himself) I would jump on that in a hot second. If I could get Yahoo Sports without the front page and just my fantasy stats I would sign up for it and use it every day. If I could get Rotoworld with just the updates and no articles I would NOT sign up for that ever! The articles there are money (FYI, I just gave you a fantasy secret and if you didn’t already know it you’re the guy everyone else in your league takes advantage of). Meetifyr is that kind of clean, streamlined, jet powered motor scooter. The problem is the engine breaks down all the time.

Enough talk, I’ll show you some of Meetifyr’s luxuriously long and sensual leg:

So let’s say my last fantasy football league was a failure, so I put together twelve of the biggest football fans I know from all of walks of life. I’m afraid Carmen Electra’s going to win. She’s probably been with so many football players she could get a job as an NFL scout. Anyways, so I set up my calendar, say I only want to draft on Saturdays, and I send an email to all my buddies. They click the link and can all really easily toggle whether they are available or not for the given timeframe. Wham, nice and easy, a few clicks later we find out when we can meet:

The site does one thing and does it well. It merges a large group’s busy-ness. It meetifies. It’s a meetifier. No wait, it’s a MEETIFYR! The important thing is that it merges it all together for all these people who have different calendar programs, some of which they can sync online and some they can’t, and even people who use A PENCIL AND PAPER! Yeah, trust me, there are some of them out there. With a couple clicks they transfer only the relevant data.

Alright, ready for the bad part? And by “bad part” I really mean “bad parts”. Note the plural aspect of that last sentence. There are tons of problems with the site. Honestly, as of now I think it’s just a super proof of concept. Instead of dwelling on the problems I’m going to make a quick list. Sorry Meetifyr, this will be less painful, I promise.

• You can’t name your meetings. If you try to type one in here:

  

  Then as soon as you refresh the page you get that beautiful “Give your meeting a name” prompt again. Or when you email your buddy the link that message is still there.

• You can only choose two timeframes (4 weeks or 8 weeks into the future). What if you want to make it an event sometime in August? Not only is it farther away than you can choose, but you also can only allow for the entire time from now until then, not just the four week period in August.
• There are no access rights. Everyone can edit everything, from the event title (if it did save), to other people’s availability, to adding and deleting users. You have to have 100% confidence in the people you send this too. On the surface this might be ok, but trust me, if you’re setting up a fantasy football league the entire league is made up of eight year olds. Not literally, but in their heads they are eight. In some misguided attempt at humor one of them will totally screw this up.
• Attendees are available by default. You cannot tell if a user simply hasn’t checked yet or really is available all the time. There really needs to be a “not yet responded” state for the toggle.
• If another user makes a change you need to refresh to see it. It’s not live updating. In the perfect world where users only update their own events you can actually almost overlook this. But what if two people want to invite Jimmy Hoffa into the league? All the sudden they both add Jimmy separately, and you have multiple Hoffa’s. If you delete one his body might get lost somewhere. Seriously, Jimmy could edit one of his calendars and you could delete the wrong one… the one he edited.
• It doesn’t integrate with anything. Compared to all these other really major complaints this might just be a feature request for something nice. It would be great if when Carmen Electra clicked the link you email her and logged in (yes, I am requiring logins now) she could input some credentials and sync her Google Cal. Then she can say what days she is busy without tabbing back and forth between windows figuring out when she’s going to a movie premier and when she’ll be at the Playboy Mansion and when she has time to do my fantasy draft. This should be extra easy for them since the site is powered by Google App Engine. Right? (I really don’t know if that makes it any easier to integrate, but it says Google on it.)
• There might be browser problems with IE. Since the site is super slow I only messed around with it in Chrome and Firefox for anything over fifteen minutes, but I used IE for about two minutes and got some JS errors. Everything has problems with IE, so I’m not sure if this really matters. Should we complain that coffee is bad for dinosaurs? No, dinosaurs are dead and everyone else is totally cool with coffee. IE compliance is the least of Meetifyr’s worries.

Oh yeah, and when you try and edit your events, save times, load the page, etc, it’s really really f’ing slow. Bleh. So slow. I think I might have already mentioned that, but it should be said again. And again and again and again. Hopefully someday in the near future this thing will actually be usable. Socrates would say something about how the form of Meetifyr is perfect, but the actual Meetifyr is far from it. Meetifyr, strive to be all you can be. I would love to use this tool someday.