"Tungle Me" Is The Social Way of Asking "When Are You Free?"

How many times have you tried coordinating meetings with colleagues, business partners and vendors only to spend unnecessary minutes trying to sort through the random madness? A majority of the time, I’m betting that the problems with scheduling a meeting rests on the back and forth taking place between all the parties. But what if I told you that you could remove the amount of time wasted in that unnecessary communication? That’s where Tungle.me comes into play – it basically takes your calendar and moves it into the Cloud and lets anyone book a meeting with you.

Okay, okay…you might be one of those businesses that runs their email through Google Apps and still share their calendar with their co-workers and other privileged individuals, but there are a few things that Tungle.me offers you that would be very beneficial to your privacy and also help be your social secretary. First of all, you can synch up your calendar with your Tungle account and still only display your free or available times without any details – giving you a bit of anonymity with where you happen to be. Second, with the synching technology, when people set a meeting on Tungle.me, it will then be posted on whatever calendar you want, whether it be your primary Google Calendar or your Outlook/Entourage calendar so that you will never miss a meeting. The next feature that Tungle has is that you can arrange appointments amongst multiple contacts through their own Tungle account. You won’t have to worry about arranging your meeting with one party only to try and figure out the third party’s schedule – it’s all there for you! Could Tungle.me be considered the ultimate scheduling tool out there?

A review of how Tungle.me really works

When you first visit the Tungle.me website, you are greeted with several options on how you wish to log in. You can use the more traditional method through your username and password OR you can use a more social (media) route and login using your LinkedIn, Microsoft Live, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, Gmail or Facebook account. Once you’ve logged in, you can build out your profile and choose how you want to create your own calendar. Now that you have your very own custom calendar in the Cloud,  you can do with it whatever you want. And did I mention that you’ll have your very own custom URL? So instead of a rather lengthy web address that you won’t really remember, you can have it be totally branded like me: tungle.me/kenyeung – obviously vanity domains like this will go fast depending on how many people sign up for accounts. To help spread the word, you can also embed a link to your Tungle.me calendar right into your very own email signature so people will always have a place to reference your availability.

If you’re running your very own consultancy or have a website where you want people to find your calendar, say on your blog or personal website, then you’ll be glad to hear that Tungle.me also has widgets that you can embed on your site to allow more access to your schedule. Moreover, they have also integrated themselves with smartphones by allowing you the option of synching your appointments to your iPhone and Blackberry.

The overall interface of what any user would see when viewing your profile is pretty simple – in fact, Tungle.me isn’t that complicated of a service. It’s just taking your calendar that you have in Outlook or whatever else you have and putting it out there in the Cloud where you can access it from anywhere, but just giving people their own area to see when you are available minus the details – unless you want to share it.

Scaling Tungle’s application

Some might be wondering whether or not Tungle.me’s application and service can really scale and become something useful for a brand or business? Can it really grow and succeed as a calendar management system? I wholeheartedly think that it can be a powerful tool for businesses and even individuals. Imagine you’re at a meeting or conference or even a party where you have just a few minutes to talk to people before moving along. You talk to someone who happens to want to do business with you and while the iron is still hot, you both want to schedule that important next meeting. Unfortunately, you might not be able to take out your iPhone, Android device or even Blackberry to check out your calendar because most likely you only use your phone to view your appointments, not make scheduling changes. So you simply give out your Tungle.me username to them and tell them to “Tungle you”. That’s it…when they get home, they can easily look up when you’re available and book an appointment with you immediately. Now, it’s not set in stone when they fill out the time slot so you can either reschedule based on your priorities or simply not accept their request.

Planning your events and meetings is often a busy endeavor and most people probably spend a lot of time coordinating with others. With everyone on different systems that aren’t linked together, then isn’t it better for you to have that common application that will let people easily book appointments and save you much time and energy? I’d like to think so.

You can try out Tungle’s service for yourself by going to their website – it’s open to the public.