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Please critique my startup: FuseCal.com

31 points by sheriff ↗ HN
Hi folks. We've got a new web app at http://www.FuseCal.com that lets you pull calendar events out of a regular web page and into your personal calendar. No microformats needed... it looks for event-like patterns right in the HTML document (kind of like Dapper with AI, for events only).

We're pretty new, far from perfect, and looking for your standard agonizingly-critical feedback... Please tell me how we can make FuseCal more useful to you. Thanks a lot!

36 comments

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Hates_
I only had a quick look but to me it looks great. Not really the sort of thing I would use but it seemed to work well with the example calendar. My only gripe was it added all the found events straight off the bat. Personally I would prefer it to add none and give me the option to add them all or just a select few.

My only real critique was the audio on the demo video. It really sounded cheap. You'd get a lot more "wow" factor using a proper microphone.

All in all looks like your creating a great app there.

dkokelley
To remove all and then hand pick the ones you like, it seems that you can "select all" and then move them over, then add the ones you like.

I guess a better way to do this would be to default everything to "not accepted" and then ask the user: "what do you want to import?" with the option: "Everything!"

tibetsprague
(FuseCal Developer) We're working on a revamped event selection UI right now which should be out in a couple weeks. It will make the simple cases of selecting all the events or just a few of them much easier.
paulsb
On the example calendar, I think it would have been better to have the green box on the left and the red box on the right. Drag and dropping things from left to right rather than from right to left is more instinctive from a users point of view because one would normally read from left to right (most of your target audience would anyway).
dkokelley
I really like this application. It works very well for the stage it's in.

I want to point out a simple error I found. Use the link http://www.canyons.edu/Offices/PIO/NewsReleases.html to see events on that page. These are the news releases for my college. Notice that the application doesn't find all of the events on the page.

If I could tell the app "This area includes an event not already found. Please add it." then I could work with any events that are missed (and there will always be one somewhere that doesn't work).

A feature suggestion along this line is a way to see the events in the source preview (maybe highlighted in some way) so I can see what the event is and get any background information from it.

Good luck with this. I really like this idea!

dskhatri
It's a good idea with an intuitive UI! You could offer a simple API/javascript button that event organizers (eg. Boston Symphony Orchestra, Ticketmaster or StartupSchool.org) could place on their websites. A guest clicks on the button and gets the opportunity to add the event to his/her everyday calendar app.
ken
The audio in your screencast could use some help. It sounds generally dead, and sometimes goes high, or low, or skips.
scorxn
I went to the screencast first, and the audio quality struck me as well. You're too close to the mic. Gotta back up (physically) and keep your record levels near the top of the green. As you speak, try to modulate your voice. If you're not recording in a studio, a simple trick is to put a blanket behind the mic. This will let you back up from the mic and raise your levels without catching reverb or background noise.
shawndrost
Looks good! On the "import calendar" page, I would put the source page below the detected events, and separate it from the rest of the page (by adding a border).
sheriff
hey! great minds think alike!

our latest mockups have had them reversed like you're suggesting. it was a little weird for us at first, because we'd gotten used to the way it currently is, but it's definitely better with the source viewer on the bottom.

raju
Wow! Great site. I agree with Hates_ in that you get a lot more bang for the buck if your demo had better sound.

Having said that, awesome website. Great logo and a very nice layout. I tried it my library's home page and it worked very well.

I certainly will be using this. Great work! Thanks, and good luck...

frazerb
Really nice idea. I've hacked countless snippets of perl to do this for me in the past, so would love an app that would relieve me of this task.

One suggestion -

I used http://www.junction.co.uk/HTMLTemplates/whats_on/music/dates...

but it kind of got the wrong idea about which bit of text was important.

How about extending the post-process ("Events I want / Events I don't want") page so that I can give some hints to the app about which bit of text represents the event name / date / time etc.

keep it up, guys.

notauser
Picking up on an earlier article, I really like the way you (don't) do user accounts. Well worth a look by others who want to see how this _should_ work.

I wouldn't have bothered looking at it if I had to log in, but this was just easy. And now I have seen how well it works, I might just use it :)

Or watch a web cast. It's amazing how many people don't have Flash, or hate Flash, or are on limited bandwidth/transfer, or just don't like video. And if you try and use some other format it just multiplies all the above by a factor of ten.

kingnothing
Looks pretty cool, although I couldn't get it to work with the first site I tried. It's one I use for local events: www.thecornernews.com. It worked if I selected a date and used that URI, but I couldn't find a way to get all of the events on every day from the front page to load up.

On the plus side, I dig your design and that's a pretty nice domain name, too.

iamwil
make it so I can forward an evite email to you, and you'll follow the link for me, and do the processing. when done, send me an email giving me a simple way to pick and choose which events to add. If I had already set it up, it'll auto pick and add events to my calendar.
thenotself
This worked well grabbing toronto concert events from http://www.rotate.com/tickets.php

I had problems importing into Google Calendar though. It worked, but it imported 4 calendars, and eventually timed out and showed a FuseCal.com error page.

Other than that - great service, although it seems limited for a startup unless you add some widgets.

thenotself
This worked well grabbing toronto concert events from http://www.rotate.com/tickets.php

I had problems importing into Google Calendar though. It worked, but it imported 4 calendars, and eventually timed out and showed a FuseCal.com error page.

Other than that - great service, although it seems limited for a startup unless you add some widgets.

sheriff
weird... i'll put this into our bug db. if it happens again, can you send me feedback via the form in the app (so we can followup via email)?
ggrot
I like the concept. In addition to all of the other excellent suggestions below, you really should tackle speed when processing the calendar - it is too slow.

I would think not just about end-to-end latency: which you should think about, but also progress indication so the user has an idea of how things are going.

sheriff
did you get a chance to try the UI for registered, logged-in users? we're thinking about making the workflow for guest users more similar to that.... do you think it would help the perception of latency?
sheriff
Thanks so much, folks... this has already been way more helpful than I was expecting!

I'm planning to get back to each of you very soon, but in the meanwhile, let's keep these awesome suggestions coming!

neilk
I tried a MySpace band page (hoping it would import tour info) and instead got all the comments as "events". Oops. Perhaps you should consider the domain name, it can indicate certain kinds of calendars worth importing.

It's really slow, unless it's also overloaded right now.

This is a hard problem though, and you deserve credit for attempting it.

sheriff
What you can currently do to get MySpace events is click the "view all" link next to Upcoming Shows on the profile page. The URL of the events-only page will harvest correctly.

You might be onto something with the idea of a rule system to handle things like that automatically... I hadn't considered it before. Thanks!

tocomment
That's really neat. I really need a bookmarklet for it though. It shouldn't be hard. Let me know if you need help on that.

It would also be great if this could work within Gmail somehow, that's where I most often get frusterated that I can't easily add things to my calendar.

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tibetsprague
(FuseCal Developer) Bookmarklet on the way. We have had a ton of folks ask us for email integration so it's definitely on our horizon.
aykall
Hey! It looks like you are building something great!!

First I tried the page your website suggested and everything worked just fine. Than I decided to hit back and try another site. I typed the calendar URL I wanted and than I just couldn't hit Ok. It wasn't working. So I had to reload the page and than Ok button was working. Well, I'm using Firefox 3 maybe is because of that but you should check it out.

Also I tried to add http://www.core77.com/calendar/ and I couldn't because the only thing I got was the processing status bar for more than 10 minutes.

Have you ever thought about building a Firefox plugin for it? It would be a great tool.

Well, I can say is that your work is really pretty dam good! Good luck!

tibetsprague
Thanks for the feedback! Speed is a significant issue that we are working on, especially when a bunch of people hit the site at once.

A FireFox plugin will also definitely happen in the not too distant future.

NextNetNow
I've had the pleasure of consulting to the FuseCal team. The problem they are solving - bringing structure to unstructured events - is really tricky stuff. Fortunately they are super smart and dedicated. FuseCal is definitely a startup to watch in '08.
chrisconley
great work guys; i've been really impressed with it so far. it's been super helpful for me!

yes, everyone's being pretty nice here, but it's well deserved. you guys definitely have something going here.

jamesbritt
Interesting, but not working for me.

I imported a calender from another Webs which seemed to go fine.

But when I try to embed the FuseCal calender on my site, nothing appears.

On my FuseCal calender list page, it tells me, "Error processing this URL", but no details on just what this error might be, or what can be done about it.

jamesbritt
Follow up: A series of E-mail exchanges with someone from FuseCal got things sorted out.

They were very nice and helpful.