Today Meeting Burner (www.meetingburner.com) came out of beta and is now available to the adoring public. I was eager to give this a try right away, as I have a burning hatred for meetings and would like to see them all consumed in a holy fire of productivity.
Signing up for the free service was hella easy. The only snag was that if you want me to enter a valid email address as a username – say so before I click submit.
Once I was all signed up I needed a co-conspirator to try out the shiny new internet thing. Fortunately I work with geeks.
So Rich and I tried and tried to set up a meeting. Not as easy and intuitive as it looks on the surface… probably because we were trying to invite each other. Which you cannot do. You send out the meeting link and that’s it. That’s the invite. You can’t search for and invite other MeetingBurner users. Which is a bit odd, no?
The site itself is nice and the service is a great idea. I think it is missing that one piece – that you should be able to find and invite specific people so that the meeting ends up in their Meeting Burner schedule and they can easily click into the meeting if they are already logged in.
Once we had it up and running, it actually was nice. A great feature is that you can choose to share your entire screen, a particular program, or part of a screen. Could help avoid those potentially embarrassing Growl pop-ups during presentations.
I’ll definitely keep an eye on this one. It’ll be interesting to see how it ends up playing with other websites and apps. (By the way, there is an iPhone app, but I didn’t play with it yet. Meetings on the go-go?) If you want to try it, there is a free account available so you can have a play. I think this is a great option for small businesses and start-ups that don’t need something crazy like Web-Ex but do need something a bit more robust than what Skype can provide.
