I want you to stop what you are doing right now and go try Presdo. It is a deceptively simple online scheduling assistant that is a prime example of what a modern Web app should be. It only shows you what you need to see at the moment that you need to see it. And it understands what you want to do based on normal (and not-so-normal) English that you type in.
“We actually threw a lot away,” says founder Eric Ly, who previously was a co-founder of LinkedIn and its first chief technology officer. He wrote most of the code himself and bootsrapped the entire site with only $35,000 of his own money. “I left LinkedIn on a Friday, and started Presdo on Saturday,” he tells me. That was back in April, 2006. He had to develop his own natural-language algorithm to deal with events, times, and scheduling, and the words people use to describe those things. The whole site is built with Ruby on Rails, Ajax, and the LAMP stack.
The home page is a plain, Google-inspired box. But instead of typing in what you are looking for, you type in what you want to do and with who: “Coffee with Eric in SF,” “Movie with Nadia Fri night,” “Meeting with Henry at 2:30 pm.”
It then takes you to a page with pre-populated fields based on what you typed in: when, who, where, what. You can refine the details further on this page. If you typed in the person’s email in the first box, it appears in the “who” field. If you didn’t, you can enter it at this point.
Presdo lets you pick a location by searching through local listings on a Google map. You can pick one near you, near the person you are meeting, or in between. (It helps if you first register with your own email and location.)
Or you can look at a list view of nearby places instead.
Presdo guesses what day and time you meant and puts those in as well. But you can offer up alternative times and allow the other party to pick the best one or suggest their own.
When you are satisfied with what you have, you hit “Send Invite.” The other person gets an e-mail with the details and a link back to Presdo, where they can change the time or place. You can also add a message. All the messages back-and-forth are recorded on the event page.
Once everything is set, you can export the meeting to your calendar (Presdo supports Outlook, iCal, Google Calendar, and Yahoo Calendar).
Every time you schedule an event with a new person, Presdo remembers who they are for the next time. You can also use Presdo as a to-do list. There are some obvious features Ly needs to add, such as support for other forms of messaging beyond email including mobile text messaging and Twitter. But he is off to a good start. The service is free, and he hopes to eventually charge for premium subscriptions. You can try it out now, and tell us what you think in comments.
Applying the task creation method they use to almost any other web app’s user content creation process would provide a huge step forward in user interaction on the web
I love this. This is almost exactly what I had in mind for a site idea. Bravo Eric.
errr – where’s the journalism here? Seems like you’ve just published an advert.
I Want Sandy does the natural language thing also and is integrated very nicely into Twitter.
I don’t know about this – the natural language thing is cute, but it essentially makes what should be a one step process a two+ step process – I enter my line, then have to further refine the process, rather than just entering that information directly. It works nicely in some simple cases, but say that I want to invite 10 people to dinner, or organize a larger event, then it’s back to a bunch of typing and clicking.
Might work well with other communication channels – if I could actually organize an event over SMS, or IM, using something like this then that would be a good place to start.
Hey not everyone uses Twitter… especially not the folks at techcrunch right?
i’ve always been amazed at how terrible (non-intuitive to be specific) the big scheduling sites are.
this is a wonderful service; i’m an instant convert.
Cool App, but cheesy attention getter.
“I want you to stop what you are doing right now and go try Presdo”
Could use a little work for this case:
Meeting at Lefty’s on the 12th
It gets the meeting and locale right, but suggests “the 12th” as a message, rather than as a day.
You know how you hate trying to coordinate a meeting between 4 people with busy calendars? Presdo comes to help.
Eric has developed a kick-ass simple app with much intelligence under the hoods for a very complex problem.
It’s a natural to live within and on top of social networks.
Congratulations!
I am amazed how simple and how powerful the user interface is. The high recognition rate of different kinds of scheduling syntaxes a human would use is exceptional. good work eric!
What does “deceptively simple” mean? Simple or not simple? Why deceptive?
this is real neat slick app – and I cant even stop at imagin all the potential opportunities, partnerships etc! Go Eric… and Erick!
I like the minimalistic interface.
In an age of over information, sleek interface and organized solutions is a must.
Also, encouraged but Eric’s guts to go through with a bootstrap model.
Awesome
Ummm…. is it actually showing sample searches?
my second visit to the homepage showed ” Try it: tony_conrad@gmail.com, Tue 1pm ”
Who is tony_conrad? If he was just some user, I’ll never touch this thing again.
S L O WWWWWWWWWW.
Oops – should have prepared better.
Looks like the site was “crunched”..
Proxy Error
The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.
The proxy server could not handle the request GET /.
Reason: Error reading from remote server
Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS) Server at http://www.presdo.com Port 80
I would say another AJAX misuse….
I think they have turned another one step process into multi-step process which looks cool but something no one would want to do everyday…
Also, looks like its down now (1:51pm PST).
Good Luck Eric!!!
Would be great if it worked…kept hanging up on me
if google is any indication that simplicity always wins out in the end, then this is gonna go places. Actually I think it’s going places regardless. There’s lots of cool monetization opportunities for an app like this, would have been cool to read a few ideas being considered by the founder in this post. Respect on starting development on it the day after you left your former employer though. U gotta be quick in this day and age.
The site is taking ages to load…! Duh! But from what I see.. an innovative concept.. so whats the way to get intimated when the event is about to occur? Are they using the same method that others do or presdo has something unique to offer for us?
Good Luck Eric & Presdo!
Cheers!
Doesn’t work. One strike and your out. I will never be back.
Can’t even get to the site, no doubt thanks to this coverage…inquiring minds want to know why it’s not hosted on EC2…
Proxy error. Fire the head of IT
It does load (not down completely though).. just created an event http://www.pres...edule/show/2049 ! (Coffee with Eric @ 8
) !!
But takes 15+ minutes to see it progress to next step! *sob* !!
This is great, but when choosing a calendar, for google it opens up the google calendar page rather than syncing it directly to google calendar in the background. Dale @5 is right, now there are two steps rather than one step. It would be awesome if it just saves the event and then if need be, asks to modify it.
Google Calendar also is kinda two step process.
this is what i need. Being as disorginized and having such passionate love for googles SE this is creat3d for my soul
Looks like a nice service but just after sending one event, the site went down temporarily. Must be the TC effect!
The Techcrunch effect is now almost as powerful as the Digg effect, site is bonking badly. I’ll try later.
It annoys the hell out of me when just because a company has gone for a simple search box interface it becomes ” a copy of google , or google inspired interface yada yada yada “.
Google did not invent the simple search box interface , Google have not patented the simple search box interface. Their were companies and individuals who used the simple search box interface way before Google was even dreamt up.
Erick, If you ever make a flaming comment about ” google inspired search box again ” then you best hope I never meet you because I will rip you a new Hole, thats how much I detest writers making comments like that.
Peace
@Mikael: Even though the Google simple search box did exist pre-google, Google is one of the few “large” companies that actually have a simple homepage. This is why it is the “google inspired search box”. Name another company the size of Google that has a homepage with a single textfield, single-column layout.
BTW, seems like the site is working again….
the site was working and then “presdo” it’s gone.
now we know where blaine cook really went
Certainly the value here is in the event creation algorithm. Using the website takes me 1 step outside of my email client which is where most people schedule their tasks (or facebook).
I love the simplicity of the application design, and its use of Gradual Engagement, which I am a huge proponent of.
http://www.onli...he-signup-wall/
Not working its 5:28PM ET
bad luck probably?
A little glitchy, sure, but I’m not mad at it.
The bug I encountered: when signing up, after clicking through my email confirmation, one of the fields (after username, password) is “Location (Optional).” I typed in New York, and it told me “Location Not Found.” My username & pass were scrubbed from the form fields, so I had to re-enter them. Annoying to have an optional field scrap the required field data.
Most importantly the site has the feel of a well constructed application, you can feel the sensibilities behind it, and that’s refreshing and rare.
PS I didn’t experience any page-load issues, speed was fine.
This seriously took 2 years with Rails!? The chronic plugin would get you 80% of the natural language functionality. TWO YEARS! I guess the design does look like 2006.
Presdo is great: it is simple and intuitive for people to use even if they have never tried it before, and I love that there is no complex configuration or setup needed which has made other systems a pain. it is also a great starting point for lots of other productivity apps to build off of… I have gotten pretty much a 100pct use rate from other people I have tried it with, and they like it too. Scheduling is a pain in the ass and Presdo is a very helpful tool to make it less so. Congrats, Eric!
I liked what I see first time. This dude is amazing and very impressive idea.
it is like gutmeet.com with more steps and slower
Also similar to:
Timebridge.com (Outlook focused)
Tungle.com (Outlook focused)
Renkoo.com (friend focused)
Though, like Erick, I like Presdo.com the most for its simplicity.
@sd how is it like gutmeet.com? gutmeet has like a dozen fields…. it looks like outlook practically
@rob, you just do 10 things in 10 steps with Presdo, does that fool you that’s simpler? haha. interesting.
i am sure Presdo has more field than other sites. a lot more if you include the “next steps”
This is cool. I can see people using this.
Couldn’t the same thing be accomplished with a couple of text messages in 1/10th of the time?
I don’t get it. Can’t I just shoot a quick email, IM, or text message and do the same thing? What am I missing?
I like the simplicity of the application and its presentation. It makes scheduling a event with my friends a lot easier. Nice app!
Eric Ly founder comments his launch! {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/RKnNdFctBT_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”Eric Ly founder comments his launch! ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/qXBzG5IRy0″}}}
It looks very slick, but instead of “deceptively simple,” I’d say it’s deceptively complex. Agree about misuse of Ajax. Promoting users for more information is great for complex forms (TurboTax is the master at this), but not for event scheduling. Everything you need should be on one page; event name, date, time, location, invitees. Still, I do like the end result of the event, and the integration with iCal and Google calendar is nice. I’ll give it a try.
Dah! “Promoting users” should have been “prompting users.”