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Comment by drewcrawford | Hacker News Reader

Two ideas.

1. I desperately want to be able to send a link to somebody and have them be able to book a N-minute meeting on my calendar (CalDav) without any further interaction. I have spent probably several hours trying out products, all of which suck. I currently spend $30/month on a tool that really doesn't even work.

2. The enterprise IM (CampFire, HipChat, etc.) is pretty well done at this point, but the "group chat for the somewhat public" space isn't. If I am supporting an open-source project the only game in town is IRC, which is hard to use for people who need support. If I want to have a permanent chatroom with 15 software developers that I know socially and allow people to drop in, there's no system for that.

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http://webchat.freenode.net/?randomnick=1&channels=ubuntu&ui...

Is actually quite easy to use..

1. Just out of curiosity, could you please share what that tool is?

2. Like iffyuva said, I believe HipChat has that option. As does Campfire. The thing is maybe those groups aren't willing to pay for such a solution?

> The thing is maybe those groups aren't willing to pay for such a solution?

Actually I think they want to pay more. At least I do. HipChat charges $2/user; I would pay $5 or $10.

The real problem is that tools designed for companies consolidate the billing. If I start a chat for my local user group then I am on the hook socially to upgrade my plan to let new people join. If I am successful in cultivating a useful chat then essentially I am punished for it, and the punishment grows without bound. One of the groups I participate in has over a thousand members.

Meanwhile I would be happy to pay for a friend or three, with the understanding that the other 997 people who may want to join need to pay their own way. And with mostly individual accounts you can probably ask for significantly more per user than HipChat can.

And the effort to get people to sign up might be effectively free if you funnel part of the license fee back to the organization who no longer needs to pass the hat around for pizza money or whatever. This may create regulatory problems, but if we're just talking about the customer acquisition equation, there are a lot of awkward situations where somebody forgot to bring cash that I would very happily roll into a monthly debit to forget about.

the first one you describe is exactly what you can do on outlook. Everyone who is connected to the same exchange server can view everyone elses calendar and see which times they are free and which times they already have meetings scheduled and then they can send a meeting request at a time that everyone is and it is automatically added to your calendar unless you reject it. The only problem with this is that outside clients wont have access to you exchange server.

> The only problem with this is that outside clients wont have access to you exchange server.

My company consists of: me and the guy sitting a few feet from me. If I wanted to schedule a meeting with that person, Exchange would be a poor improvement on the existing solution of turning my head.

Google Calendar has a 'show free/busy' option to show your availability but not your appointments, and do auto-accept for requests too.

What tool are you using right now? Google Calendar's fine for me at the moment but I'm always looking for options.

I believe HipChat has this concept of 'Guest Access'. Won't that be helpful, just curious.

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