Webfusion

As much as we love the poetry of code, it’s important to connect in the real world. Webfusion recently spoke with Matthew Smith (MS), who heads up the development team at Flexvite, a new web app that aims to help busy individuals find a time to meet. In contrast to traditional invitations, Flexvite allows friends to vote and collaborate to find a time and place to meet, so you don’t have to miss another episode of Myth Busters (spoiler: turns out, science wins.)

WF: How did the idea for the project come about? Did the development process for the program flow naturally from your experiences as users of competing products?

MS: The idea came about from personal experience and pain trying to figure out which days were best for busy people to get together. I saw the problem in 2 different places initially. The first was my wife and her friends negotiating a good day for their monthly girls night in (dinner party). Because of everyone’s busy schedules, it seemed to take 15-20 e-mail replies, and generally was very tedious for the organizer to resolve.

I also experienced a similar problem as I was trying to put together an iPhone developer group for the
first time. It would be our first one and I had no good way to poll the group for what day was best without the traditional hassle of all that e-mail back and forth or without sticking my thumb in the air and selecting a few random dates. Thus the idea for Flexvite was born.

We like portmanteau (flexible + invite) – how did you hone in on the domain name Flexvite? Did you consider any (epic) alternatives?

I considered lots of different alternatives, but Flexvite really jumped out as a brand and amazingly the domain name wasn’t taken, so I seized it! Since choosing the name, the only problem I’ve had is that if I speak it to fast it’s hard to hear the ‘v’ in Flexvite. Maybe it’s just my voice/tone, but people always seem to think I’m saying ‘Flexfight’ which starts a whole different conversation Try to say it three times fast and you’ll see what I mean.

How does Flexvite integrate into various social networks? Do you have plans to incorporate APIs from Facebook or Twitter for social sharing in the future?

At the moment we have a very minimalistic integration with Twitter and Facebook, but there are big plans for the future, so stay tuned!

As you approached the project, did you encounter any technical challenges with development? What innovative features have you implemented (or planned) for the app?

Flexvite is built and hosted on Google app engine. That has had it’s ups and downs, but overall I’m very happy. We have implemented several innovative features for the product including:

1. Giving the user the ability to specify a rough ‘range’ for when an event should happen (as opposed to making you pick specific dates)
2. Making voting so intuitive that you can confidently send it to anyone, and
3. Creating optimized algorithms that automatically close/set an event as soon as reasonable.

Your site features clean, intuitive design and content elements – how did you integrate the design and branding process in with the development of the application?

The design is something we’ve constantly iterated on based on user feedback, but what you see today is basically an evolution of a design I scratched out in a notebook and subsequently prototyped as furiously fast as I could. It’s a been a wild ride so far, and I’m looking forward to continuing to hone Flexvite into a valuable tool for getting people face to face.