In Doodle, you don’t need to login and can freely edit everything without loggin in or registering. No locked doors as in the Safe Route of Registration.
Someone who organizes an event (where people with limited time want to meet) sets up the title for the event and clicks together the points of time when the thing possibly could take place. He sends the link to the poll to everyone would should attend the event.Everyone can click the link, enter their name, and click on the times they have time. The page makes it easy to find out when to meet.
If in “Desperate Housewives” the girls would organize a meeting in their neighborhood using Doodle, this would never work. Someone would frame someone else, delete or change the other persons times or put someone else on the list who didn’t want to come. Nevertheless, the Doodle website is very successful to organize meetings for everyone else. How can that be?
Well, Doodle has an optimistic approach: They just think users won’t do this. And as no critical data is entered, it works for them. And if some Desperate Housewives use this to hurt each other, it’s 99% happy users and 1% unhappy users. Maybe this model should be used much more. Next: what about an OpenID, Facebook Connect, TwitterIDs and GoogleIDs? Should we use those?
You’re right, this works well for us. We designed Doodle with the assumption that users will act cooperatively within the private space of one meeting request poll. This assumption proved to be valid in the vast majority of cases because the people in one specific poll know each other. For other cases (especially larger polls) we offer the possibility to create so-called hidden polls.