Here’s a really good idea — Doodle: a site that makes it easier to schedule meetings involving several people.
How does it work?
1. Create a new poll with a title, description, your name, and possible dates and times.2. You get a link to your new poll. Send this link to all participants.
3. The participants use the link to visit the poll and select suitable dates.
4. You use the same link to watch the poll’s progress and the result.
And it’s free!
Anthony Lane didn’t like it. Poor chap. I enjoyed it greatly, and laughed a lot during it. Lane’s review is good in parts, though. For example:
We begin with Miss Potter pitching Peter Rabbit to publishers, one of whom remarks, out of her hearing, “That book won’t sell ten copies.” (This is known as the ironical-historical mode, inviting the audience to smirk at the blindness of the past.) Nevertheless, the company, Frederick Warne, agrees to publish, if only to give Norman Warne (Ewan McGregor), the baby of the family, something to do with his time. Why, one must ask, did McGregor take this part? I can only imagine that he received the script one morning, after a late night, saw the words “Beatrix Potter,” assumed that he was being offered the role of his namesake, Mr. McGregor, fancied himself in a long white beard running past cabbages with a rake, mouthing Scotch oaths at departing vermin, called his agent to accept, and went back to bed. Not until later did he realize that he would be required to utter the line, “We shall give them a bunny book to conjure with.”
Only one man on earth can speak those words with a straight face, and that is Hugh Hefner. Needless to say, McGregor takes emergency precautions, appearing throughout in a mustache the size of a yew hedge, and thus defying us to work out whether his face is straight or not…
This morning’s Observer column.
Coincidentally, in another part of the forest, entrepreneurs Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, the guys who founded Kazaa and later Skype (which they sold to eBay in 2005 for $2.6bn) announced their particular variation on IPTV. The service is to be called Joost and combines aspects of file-sharing software and regular broadcast television. Like Skype, Joost requires users to download and install a free ‘client’ program which enables them to browse the internet for channels and clips they’re interested in.
The Joost website is deliciously opaque, riddled with PR-speak about how the new service is, apparently, ‘powered by a secure, efficient, piracy-proof internet platform that enables premium interactive video experiences while guaranteeing copyright protection for content owners and creators’.
In the ordinary course of events, one would be inclined to dismiss this as hype, were it not for the fact that Zennstrom and Friis have a track record of unleashing not one but two disruptive innovations on an unsuspecting world. So let’s suppose for a moment that Joost is for real. What then?
One implication is that if it spreads like Skype (putting on 150,000 new users a day), Joost could eventually strangle the net. Or, more realistically, it would provoke dramatic action from the world’s ISPs to fend off that outcome…