Using a third party remotely hosted system for setting up meetings has risks, partly because of the data that is involved (you need to trust the service provider), and partly because if the services fails mid way through fixing a date you get egg on your face.
But such services are a big, time-saving improvement on email.
I make a lot of use and highly rate Meetomatic. Via Wayne Hodgins I came across a service with similar features called Doodle, by Michael Näf. It has a less "retro" design than Meetomatic, and allows you to specific discrete time slots for potential meetings; and unlike Meetomatic, Doodle publishes all users' availability as this information becomes available, so using it feels like more of a collective process than with Meetomatic, where only the organiser of the meeting sees participants' availability.
Doodle is also available in French, German, and Rumanian, as well as English, and, unlike Meetomatic, it carries no advertising.
For the moment I will stick with Meetomatic, but Doodle is the first alternative that comes close.
Just re-reading this blog-posting, and thought I'd better 'beam in' to say that now it is only Meetomatic that has no advertising! We have also ditched the retro look, and added much better fine-grained time slots and wordlwide time zones.
Check it out: www.meetomatic.com
All the best...
-The Meetomatic Team
Posted by: Meetomatic Team | 09/07/2009 at 18:06