Doodle Blog

Doodle published a Gadget for iGoogle almost exactly one year ago. It is used heavily and feedbacks are very positive, e.g. this one: “A simple but great plugin to see my Doodles. From the creator of Doodle himself. Cool idea and extremly useful!”

The same gadget can be used in many other places:

• In the sidebar of your Firefox browser: Visit this address, create a bookmark, edit the new bookmark’s properties and activate the “open in sidebar” checkbox, then open the bookmark.
• In your Gmail sidebar: Activate Gmail labs, enable “add any gadget by URL”, go to “Settings / Gadgets” and add the Doodle gadget (URL).
• In your Google Calendar: Activate labs for Google calendar, enable the “add any gadget by URL” gadget and use that gadget to add the Doodle gadget (URL).

Where else can it be used? Tell us in the comments!

And BTW: we also have a Facebook and a XING app. And there are other ways to integrate Doodle with Google’s and others’ calendars. Learn more.

All Doodle users can now effortlessly include attachments within their meeting requests and polls – whether a meeting agenda, invitation, picture or video – thanks to the integrated new feature from the collaboration service drop.io. drop.io and Doodle have a common philosophy: collaboration with an online tool should be dead simple and possible without registration.

After a month-long test phase we can also release the integration of Google Maps. This free feature gives meeting organizers the ability to select a location for a meeting and let it display using Google Maps.

And finally, here’s some news for our enterprise Branded Doodle clients: you can now fully customize your Branded Doodle environment for internal and external use. The theming editor is only available for Branded Doodle and Premium Doodle paying customers, however, the unique URL, access control, and safety features will remain unchanged for paying Branded Doodle customers. Get the full Branded Doodle now!

A new product for Doodle lovers is now available, Premium Doodle: a personal profile that allows you to express your individuality when scheduling. Premium Doodle gives scheduling a whole new identity – yours! You can customize all your Doodle polls with your own colors and add your profile picture which will appear whenever you participate in a poll. For a fee of just $28 annually all polls you initiate and participate in will be ad-free. Premium functionality will also allow you to request personal information such as postal address, e-mail address, and phone number from poll participants – particularly helpful for binding RSVPs. We’re looking forward to welcoming Premium Doodle customers and thank them for the support they give us through it!

Get Premium Doodle now or read more!

Read the media release.

We just finished putting our August release online. Here are the major improvements:

• Extended calendar integration: You were already able to subscribe to the Doodle ICS feed to keep your calendar up-to-date with the latest Doodle information. Starting today, you can also import your calendar information into your MyDoodle account and have Doodle suggest your availabilities based on your calendar whenever you need to fill in a poll. This feature requires you to open a MyDoodle account; afterwards, you will be able to add your calendar feed here.
• Locations: We introduced an optional feature that allows you to specify an event’s location. The feature is based on Google Maps internationally and on Local.ch in Switzerland.
• Improved XING app: Our Doodle XING app was launched only recently and is already among the most popular apps on XING. As a consequence, we get lots of feedback, and we take it seriously by introducing the following improvements: 1) Users can now merge their XING Doodle account with their normal Doodle account and see the combined dashboard in both worlds. 2) Poll participants can easily be found and invited using the new contact search with auto-completion. 3) Additional participants can be invited even after a poll has been set up. To the Doodle XING app…
• More payment methods: We’ve incorporated Moneybookers and are now able to offer many additional and more convenient payment options to our Branded Doodle customers who want to use Doodle for their business, e.g. many credit cards, bank transfer, etc.

Update August 3 2009: Doodle implements 3 improvements for the XING app

Doodle is launch partner of the new XING Partner Ecosystem. Being a social network, XING enables a number of interesting functions: XING members can recognize Doodle polls they have in common with others, they see the profile picture when someone participates in a poll, and they can invite XING contacts to a meeting with just one click. Starting today, Doodle can be easily installed as a XING application.

With our latest release, we added a number of new features to Doodle. The most important one is Invite&Contact: You can now have Doodle invite your participants to a poll. This has the major advantage that Doodle then knows who you invited and can later help you contact these same people again to send a reminder or tell them about the final date & time your event will take place.

Here’s how it works:

• As the final step after creating a new poll, Doodle now allows you to inivite people. This is an option, you can still send the Doodle links out via your own mail application. If you invite from Doodle, you’ll be taken to a form where you can enter the invitees’ e-mail addresses and the message. Doodle will then send the message to those people.
• Doodle will store the e-mail addresses you enter here. Hence, the next time you use the Invite&Contact feature, Doodle will suggest e-mail addresses it knows already when you start typing. Our Privacy Policy states that we won’t misuse these addresses and that you can delete them at any time if you wish.
• Alternatively, or complementary, you can connect to your Google addressbook to use the e-mail addresses that are stored there. Note that we do not store the whole Google addressbook on our servers, so there will be no privacy and no sync issues.
• Once the people are invited, you can use the poll’s admin link to contact the invitees again: E.g., send them a reminder that they’re supposed to participate or let them know what the final date and time for your event is. Doodle provides a number of templates with typical texts for these use cases to make things more convenient and efficient for you.

We also released a number of minor news:

• People often asked us to make it possible to adjust some of the advanced options even after a poll has been created. This is now possible: You can, for example, “unhide” a hidden poll.
• We have our 29th language: Indonesian. Thank you, Martin Hadinata!

We’re launching a number of exciting features today:

• The Doodle Outlook Plugin brings together the most popular scheduling service with the widest-used calendar system on the market. Outlook users can use the plugin to automatically fill in Doodle polls and to book tentative and final slots in their calendar. More info and installation instructions
• The MyDoodle ICS Calendar Feed connects Doodle to all other major calendars like Google Calendar, Sunbird, or Mac’s iCal and keeps users updated on the state of their Doodle polls. Access your personal ICS Feed (requires MyDoodle)
• The new Branded Doodle service enables companies and other organisations to purchase their own private Doodle, branded with their logo and name, optionally ads-free or with SSL support to encrypt all traffic. Using our new setup wizard, a Branded Doodle can be ready within minutes. More info and access to the setup wizard
• The Doodle API is RESTful and supports the OAuth, the promising protocol to allow secure authorization of web services. To promote the API, we have teamed up with Sun Microsystems and Nokia and now challenge the Doodle community to build great apps and submit them to the Doodle API Contest. Deadline is April 14. More info about the contest and the API
• The showcase app for the Doodle API is the Doodle Mail Init Agent. The agent is a power user feature that allows to create Doodle polls via e-mail rather than the web. The agent tries hard to recognize all variations of dates and times like “Tue”, “Tuesday”, “Mar 3rd”, “3/3″, etc. To find out more, send an e-mail to init@doodle.com. (The agent will also answer at marvin@, smith@, and other aliases.)

Update: The plugin is now available as Public Beta and can be downloaded here: http://www.doodle.com/about/DoodleOutlookPlugin.html.

Update: The Closed Beta is “sold out” after 1′000 users have signed up. But we’ll soon start a Public Beta phase, which lets everybody participate.

Over the past few months we have been working on a highly demanded Doodle Outlook Plugin. We are now inviting 1000 users to a Closed BETA. To be one of them hurry up and apply. We will send you the download page within the next few days.

The Doodle Outlook Plugin brings together the most popular scheduling service and the widest spread calendaring system in the market. Key features are Suggest, Sync and initiate Doodle polls using your Outlook calendar. The integration runs secure on your local computer without sending any sensitive calendar data to our servers. The plugin is available for Firefox and Internet Explorer. Give it a try and let us know what you think.

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