Thursday 10 June 2010

Five Doodle facts for Fing Five

My Nan loves to wax lyrical about the Doodlebugs that flew over East Anglia "during  the war". Each one did, according to Nan, have her name on it and was destined to land directly on her head. But they didn't and she is still with us at 83 and going strong! Doodle also seems to being going strong having reached its 6 million monthly unique users mark, according to its newsletter (May 6, 2010). 
Having used Doodle to organise a couple of events at work (of most importance, the Christmas lunch) I know how useful it is and how easy it is to use. I don't need to practice sending out a Doodle poll so I thought I'd do a bit of research and put together a few factoids instead:

Five Doodle facts for Fing Five:
  1. There's an app for that...
    check out the Doodle apps for Facebook and the iPhone
  2. Doodle is one of the finalists in the Enterprise 2.0 LaunchPad 2010 competition in Boston - this is no mean feat as they had to be voted into the final 4 by users.
  3. Doodle say we should take Friday afternoons off (yay!)
  4. The Premium service offers a Quick reply or "who's missing?" service helping you save valuable time by chasing people up for you. Slackers beware!
  5. Don't forget to close your poll. This is the most underused Doodle function. Doodle will close the scheduling process for you, update your calendar with the final date (if connected) and deletes all tentative calendar dates. Clever Doodle.

Further reading:

Librarian in Black's 13 ways (and 147 Tools) to help your library save money on technology 

Mashable's 4 Web-based Meeting Schedulers Reviewed

Tech Crunch's Doodle launches API for group events

and for a bit of fun:

How to analyse your doodles!

4 comments:

  1. Thanks for the Doodle facts, Rachel. I didn't realize you could close a poll, but have now checked it out and after some hunting around found where I could close it and finalize the date. So that's done, but for some reason it hasn't input it into my calendar automatically despite the fact, that as far as I can tell, I have linked with Google calendar.

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  2. Dear evans above,
    Hmmm... maybe it needs time to refresh? Sometimes Google calendar isn't that fast and it does get overloaded from time to time...

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  3. Great tips, I echo evans above about the poll closing, thanks.

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  4. Me too - never dawned on me that you could (and probably should) close a poll.

    And love that idea that we should all take Friday afternoons off because Doodle says so. Yay Doodle!

    Thanks for sharing your facts (and for the alliteration - love it!)

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