The world could really use Google Calendar

Being able to subscribe to it from
iCal on Mac, or even better sync with it
via iSync.

(Hmm... what if your real first name was Bartholomew? Gladly, it appears that that's not the case)

Anyway, I have to admit that I'm skeptical about Google doing a bangup job on a hypothetical gCalendar 1.0. So far, Google's track record with regards to groupware stuff is neither comprehensive nor impressive.

Google Groups is still quite rough around the edges, and doesn't include a fraction of the stuff that YahooGroups offers.

Orkut? Not an actual Google project per se, but still... hasn't been substantively enhanced since the get-go.

There are a hell of a lot of smart people at Google, and I'd love to work for the company someday so I hope I'm not totally shooting myself in the foot.

But I just don't see groupware as a core competency of Google currently or at least in the nearterm.

Has a kick-ass tasks/TODO manager.

I guess you've already heard of Hula, Novell's new calendaring project...

Seen it, yeah. But I'm interesting in Internet scale calendaring. I guess I never said that explicitly.

Sigh ... I already speculated that Google was very close to having all the necessary applications to build a Google Portal, 10 days before Dave Jung. LJ user "digriz" completed my thought by explicitly saying "where's Google Calendar?" In the blogosphere, 10 days is an eternity. :-)

Yeah, a Google Calendar would be great. As much as I dislike Microsoft Outlook, the calendaring portion of it is by far the best calendaring solution out there: it's definitely what justifies Outlook's existance. If someone -- anyone -- could one-up Microsoft on this, that would be great.

I want two interfaces: one "rich" interface embedded in Mozilla/Thunderbird/whatever, one web-based.

And a technical thought: up- and downloading the complete calendar file via WebDAV just does not make sense, but unfortunately that's what quite a few apps do when "sharing" a calendar...

It would be essential to have tags so items could be categorized.

It must understand timezones well (very cool if it would understand the location of the user of the calendar to time-shift accordingly.

Even better than timezones would be location awareness, which would seem to necessitate an address book that is more robust and have better interaction than the one in Gmail

It would be nice to have Gmail tags show up in Gcal.

A cool feature would be to send SMS, e-mail, or a phone call as a alarm/wake-up/reminder to mobile devices (understanding the timezone of the mobile's location would be critical).

It would also be nice to have Gcal send a ping to a device/IP address to trigger an action in a network aware device (start my coffee, move my files for my meeting to my laptop/PDA/mobile).

But why does everyone sit around dreaming up new product lines for Google? Hello? Theres no good reason Google should build a web calendar or any other app. GMail doesn't leverage their search engine; its well-designed but it an open source project could clone its UI. Why not make a proposal for YAHOO to do it? They are by far the best of integrating disparate web properties. Google was an insanely great search engine in 1999 when I first saw it linked to from Slashdot. But pageranks been cloned and although google is still the best, its extremely large lead over competitors is now gone. And there's no real reason why it should do these things other than the attention it gets from everyone. This is not an anti-Google sentiment - in fact when anyone tells you are "anti" something, usually they're trying to shut you up.

Jeremy-

I have to agree with Chad's comments. As I believe you know, the foundation I co-chair controls over 1M shares of Yahoo stock.

I'm really wondering, conceptually, why some of the better ideas surrounding Google futures are coming from outsiders, including, in some cases Yahoo's?

Is this a way of leveraging internal people to become motivated enough to innovate, or what?

Also, have you checked out Mitch Capor's Chandler (Kibble release) PIM functions? Lotus Agenda was pretty cool stuff, and, I have to think that OSAF will gen an excellent update (although not as soon as everyone would like).

The world is buzzing with discussions over calendaring standards. Top hinkers and top companies are involved and nothing big really happens because they are still arguments if RRULES (recurring rules) should be included in iCal-Basic.

Another example: The new Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium [Yahoo! included - h.c.] unveiled plans to standardize calendaring and scheduling applications to solve some of the frustrations faced by computer users.
...
The group envisions a three-to five-year life span to accomplish its goals, which will build on work being done by the Internet Engineering Task Force.

There's only one good reason for Google to do it: to do it already! Google can be the leader, deciding on using an incomplete standard and make it the de-facto standard, beacuse they can.

Calendaring is the real fulfillment of the promises of the semantic web.

See here for more about this:
http://www.info.org.il/WhoWhatWhenWhere/

Doesn't Yahoo already have one? Wouldn't it be easier for it to be upgraded with the features you've listed than for an entirely new platform to be created?

Or are you saying that only Google could implement the web-based calendaring application of your dreams?

I'd love the features you describe. Another big one for me would be Blackberry-like features where if you update the online version it is automatically reflected on your handheld device (be it phone or whatever) AND vice-versa from handheld to calendar.

Just providing a sync function is NOT enough. It has to be transparent and automatic for the user, or it is ultimately a failure. I've tried to manage this with Yahoo cal's own Intellisync software and trust me, it IS a failure.

I know, tough to support a thousand mobiles/handhelds blah blah blah. If Yahoo sold a phone that did this perfectly I would buy it today. Are you listening Yahoo?

Hanna hits the nail on the head the top companies continue to argue, so little gets done.

While a new calendaring group is forming at the IETF - a bottom up effort such as RSS - may be the best way to go.

For the latest information on calendar standards information look to: http://muddybranch.thejkgroup.com

We're a non exchange server company and the shared calendaring issue has been a real problem for us as well.

We're currently considering having employees start using Yahoo calendaring to share their calendars since it can sync with Outlook/PocketPC/Palm.

One feature I would like to see for small/medium sized companies like mine would be a premium option with group support so that everyone in the company can see my calendar instead of having to add each individual as a friend to each calendar.

As a few people have commented on why Yahoo doesn't do it, here'e my (post-yahoo employee) take: Jeremy wants Google to make one, so execs at yahoo put a higher priority on calendar.yahoo.com. My guess is that c.y.c team would like to do all of these things, but is comprised of probably two or three people, who spend all their time fighting fires. But with some competition in the arena, the visability of c.y.c shoots up.

So the real question is, why doesn't the executive team at Yahoo pay more attention to Jeremy? They do, unfortunately they don't see the benefit of improving c.y.c 'cause there's not going to be any big press and clammoring about it. They likely won't see a signifigant gain in usage, and thus won't see a jump in ad inventory.

However, if Google announces a calendar project, then attention is shed on other company's offerings, and yahoo already being far ahead, has a good chance of taking share, and then everyone can point at google and say, "look there's another project they didn't execute on".

Needs a good ToDo list also. Can't forget the value of the ToDo list.

Two key requirements, at least for me:

1. Does not use my personal calendar data for any purpose except informing me of things I ask to be informed about.

That is, no custom ads or reading of my calendar to keep track of the actions of competitors, if I happen to be one, or of consumers.

I'm not aware of laws prohibiting these acts on calendaring software sites, so finding a vendor which can be trusted to behave properly is key. google is one which probably won't meet my standards. It would probably read my calendar and display ads based on the calendar entries.

2. Protects my calendar data from compromise. That means something like encryption so that the calendar hosting company couldn't disclose the data even if it wanted to. Ideally, including encryption to the desktop, to limit attacks via network traffic.

Anyone remember eventsherpa.com?

Great windows icalendar client... Looks like company is under-going "restructuring"..

I don't think that the demand is as big as you all claim.

I wrote a big chunk of e v e n t S h e r p a - I can definitely say that the company (S e m a v i e w) has restructured itself completely out of existence ;) The entire staff has been laid off, the servers have been sold, etc.

It's really a shame - it was a pretty good program.

I think Jeremy's hit it pretty much on the head here, feature-wise.

Syncing sucks (and doesn't work well, or at all, between multiple devices. I want sync with my phone, pda, Outlook (for work), blackberry, web, iCal, Thunderbird, and more. I know it's a complex problem.

I don't know what Google would bring to the table, but frankly I'm not that excited. Google seems to be bringing proof-of-concept features to the market, and then not doing much more with them. I'm a gmail user, and what (little) it does, it does pretty well. Google maps, same thing. But the feature sets are really weak. Gmail -- no group lists. No calendaring (yet). No file storage. Google maps? No waypointing. No favorite locations.

Look at Yahoo! mail, calendar, address book, file & photo storage, etc. This is a complete suite of tools that people need. I don't know if a lot of people use them (I quit using my paid-for Yahoo mail account when I got Gmail). But feature-wise, they're WAY more complete than Google.

I'm starting to be less enthralled with Google's offerings. They're not improving in any significant way.

Um, since Yahoo ALREADY has a calendar, why doesn't Yahoo take and incorporate your ideas? Why do you want Google to do it?

Free icalendar hosting at icalx.com

Last updated 2003! (the interest is just not there yet)

and icalshare.com

There has been a lot of recent work on a calendar access protocol called CalDAV. CalDAV builds upon HTTP and WebDAV to provide web-based calendar sharing, free/busy time searches, and (in the future) scheduling workflow support. It builds upon prior work on iCalendar (vCalendar), iMIP and iTIP, essentially providing a different approach to a Calendar Access Protocol (CAP) than previous IETF efforts.

CalDAV web page:
http://ietf.webdav.org/caldav/

I have had a project on the backburner for a few years about calendaring, I'll do a writeup of my plans for it on my blog by tonight PDT.

The problem with this is that at the end of the day, people want this awesome super-calendar product for... free! So, the real question is, what kind of ads can you put on a calendar that people will be motivated to click on? This seems a much harder sell than gmail, whose financial success already remains unclear.

Most of these comments deal with a personal calendar. But we're talking about Google here. They think big. What if it were like their local.google.com feature, or their new movie feature, and they could return upcoming events in a given category? If you were a games programmer, it would tell you not only of upcoming holidays and personal events, but that the Game Developers Conference was coming up, and the date that your buddy from Apple was going to be in town.

In addition to traditional calendaring features, I'd really like to see RSS/RDF/XML/TLA-based calendaring feeds that encompass information beyond the date/location/subject of the event - that's kind of boring. What I want is additional meta-data that allows me to *find* events I wish to attend. This would allow the following use case - the user says to themselves: "I'm looking for something to do - Google/Yahoo/Whoever show me *type of event* events within *radius* of *place* that will occur on or around *date or date range* and that costs *dollar amount*.

In addition, in an ideal world I'd be able to enter a mode in Outlook where I could perform this type of search on upcoming events drawn from RSS feeds from people or organizations that I wish to monitor for events of interest (like, for example, the Computer History Museum). This mode would then allow me to easily add the events resulting from this query into my usual calendar.

When I've brought this idea up in the past, people have asked why current solutions, like Evite or Meetup don't meet this need. The answer is their uses differ from that which I'm describing above. Evite is more an event coordination tool, not an event discovery tool; and Meetup is for regular events, not ad hoc events, and generally restricted to a closed community - I doubt any self respecting organization wants to host its event information from a Meetup page.

Many excellent points made by previous commenters.

Jeremy asked:

> Help me out here... What am I missing?

The one thing I'd like to point folks to is hCalendar, which is a 1:1 mapping of the iCalendar standard (RFC 2445) to (X)HTML for easy inclusion in today's Web pages to easily publish calendaring information simultaneously for both humans and machines without requiring extra files, URLs, etc.

hCalendar specification

hCalendar is something that Yahoo or any other Web calendaring service could easily support and enable a whole new level of interoperability and sharing of calendaring information.

Another nice reason to say "I am moving to the GDesktop"

A variety of RSS feeds for calendar events and dates would be great. You could aggregate your friends' feeds for scheduling.

"I'm looking for something to do - Google/Yahoo/Whoever show me *type of event* events within *radius* of *place* that will occur on or around *date or date range* and that costs *dollar amount*."

Brendan said this above - MySQL 5 will have geospatial info as a built in datatype - and Google are currently hiring engineers with mysql experience.

Link that to their aquisition of Keyhole (and that Google maps thing) , and you can see where this is heading.

Yep, given the above information, I can see this leading to all sorts of things. Accept a GPS feed, and I can reserve any close conference room in the building in real time just by walking near it.

I wouldn't use it as a typical calendar. I can see using this for new and different things. Reserving tables at a diner (every diner in a x radius), parking spaces for a night out (sort by price), new releases at Blockbuster (every blockbuster in 3 miles of current location)...the lilst goes on and on.

I've been near obsessed with this issue in the last two weeks with moving from outlook to ical and have found no easy solutions. Sorry for the long comment - repressed blog post.
Here are the client apps I've found in the win world: MozCal is most stable on MozSuite (very slow and unstable on Firefox and Tbird). PHPical, like EventSherpa, is also gone. WebCalendar (http://www.k5n.us/webcalendar.php - which I've found cumbersome for other apps) will be my next bet.
My must-have feature requests:
- layered calendars. That's the reason I'm moving to iCal is for the ability to layer on and off new calendars. That will fix some of the sharing-of-personal data isssue, as it addresses the rss/rdf thing by making context much more apparent (if users chose to group it in this way).
- for RSS type apps, a "click" to add to your calendar plugin for an individual event (in addition to offering the full ics)
- intelligent, mobile syncing with my treo650

As a personal solution to event tracking that uses RSS, I'm modifying a wordpress install to publish an event feed. I'm tangled in the code right now, but should be able to get smarter eyes on it this weekend and have it up next week.

As for demand, this is totally a scratch-my-itch thing that's perfect for smaller groups to tackle. We don't really need Google, but if they do it and it's exactly what I want, that's great (how likely is that?). However, this is about as critical as microcontent can get, and the trust barrier is very high. Local copies are still key, so it will take someone flexible enough to work across the various client apps (which really do suck).
And before we get all wound up about how complicated our technogeek lives are, we don't have any exposure to the level of normal-land user need this is for this product. Can you imagine keeping a handle on family activities? That's a huge pool of unmet needs. It might be free, it might be $29.95, it's doable.

I think that the two most profitable applications of calendaring are un-coordinated meetings (dating) and recording of past events (geneology).

someone said: "I'm looking for something to do - Google/Yahoo/Whoever show me *type of event* events within *radius* of *place* that will occur on or around *date or date range* and that costs *dollar amount*."

come back in ten years. or more. the infrastructure is barely there to accurately and fully do online yellow pages. event data and other constraints layered on to that are waaaaaay off...if ever! not everyone out there spends all of their time compiling online data of everything they or their business does. you can expect major services like subways, airports, major events venues to publish data across the board in a decade...but joe's diner? nyet.

"What if it were like their local.google.com feature, or their new movie feature"

Hmmm, I think someone is ahead of you...

http://www.google.com/googleblog/2005/02/google-movies-now-playing.html

I actually like what Mozilla Calendar+PHP iCalendar can do. :^) Mozilla Calendar will send you alerts and such, and updating your web calendar is as simple as updating the calendar that you have on your PC. I would like to see PHP iCalendar have more options later, such as the ability to be browsed on a cell phone (mine does not support it), and one feature I'd *really* like that I miss from Yahoo Calendars is cell phone alarms - sending a text message to a cell phone that reminds you of an upcoming event. I wish I could do that with Mozilla Calendar. Other then that, there are probably utilities that use the iCal format that do virtually everything else.

*shrugs*

Makes me think I'd actually consider Yahoo to be perfect - *if* they'd support updating using iCal format. I can't *stand* their current interface for updating, and I *love* the way I do things using Mozilla Calendar.

Later.

I am just worried about the google haters descending on the company and saying that now google will know what everyone is doing...it is just part of their plan to take over the world...

The reason i'd rather it be google thatn yahoo, is simply because google is simple and uncluttered. Every yahoo page has so many links and adverts and features that it often takes tonnes of time to find anything on it.

"Jeremy wants Google to make one, so execs at yahoo put a higher priority on calendar.yahoo.com. "

This is so true! Then again, Google came out with Groups, and nothing has been going on with Yahoo! Groups in a loooong time.

Let's all sell all our personal information to Google.

No, wait: we do not sell it; let's give it to them for free!

Hooray Google! Horray for Mac-zealots!

This seems cool to those of us who use calendaring programs, but I have to wonder how many average computer users have the need for this. Think about it, the only real viable market is corporate users who want to use it for non-corporate reasons. I already have a calendaring system for business. I just want it to be able to cooperate in real-time with my friends calendaring systems and have my own private ‘layers’ on the calendar. The thing is, no company with any kind of security policy in effect is going to allow this kind of communication with external systems on a level that would provide the robust features we want. It’s dead before it starts. This seems unsolvable through technology alone. A more rigorous trust model must be established first. This is why the best online calendars have failed, in my opinion. Without that real-time crucial link to the calendar you really have to depend on, the corporate calendar, it really never scratches that itch we feel. I want to see total integration with my business calendar, and I’ll never really get that because of security policy, not technology.

I'd like one that supports Apple's iCal. :-D

Who says that this needs to be "groupware" oriented. Honestly, I'd find a single-user, web-accessible calendar that is linked to my GMail account to be invaluable. I could pull it up from my desk, my office, my phone, my school, anywhere I need it. Sharing it with other users is a pretty minor issue for me, and while I certainly see why people would want the groupware features, I wouldn't say that it would be a dealbreaker for a 1.0 release.

those are good guidelines. i'd like to add this:

windows ipod calendar sync

i know it's possible with outlook and 3rd party apps, but nobody likes outlook.

When you look at Jeremy's feature list for a calendar, it becomes clear this is a very complex application. More complex than email, by a long shot.

Has Google done anything this complex? Other than organizing the world's data and making it searchable in milliseconds, granted. But organizing the world's public and personal calendar data, in time space, with everything you'd want from a calendar? That gets pretty gnarly. There are several more dimensions to worry about, at least if you want to do it better than it has been done already.

Still, it would be great to see their cut on it.

BTW, slightly OT: anyone know of any kick-ass to-do list apps, and what are they called?

There is always Sunbird from Mozilla. Obviously it doesn't have all the items on your list , but you can also find plugins on Mozilla.org for both Firefox and Thunderbird.

I'd love to have these features added on to Yahoo! calendar since I already use/like it, even though it still misses some basic features that many calendar tools support.

The point of the fact is that the integration of various tools in Yahoo! is already in place and there's a large user base thats already using them.

It should be shareable and views like a database. So i can share only what i wish.

I would love the ability to add documents to certain days... like a downloadable poster for a concert event or say notes for a class on that particular day.... so an upload document relevant to the particular event would be great!

Why wait for Google to make a Calendar? The technology is here right now to make an amazing calendar. I can picture a nice Ajax-based UI using something like Hula as the backend. There is no point sitting around for the next five years until a sharing standard is finalized. If one calendar client takes off, and everybody starts using it, then its format will become the standard. Just take a look at RSS. There are now seven different RSS standards (lets not mention Atom) and the blogosphere seems to be trimming the fat and settling on 1-2 formats, and one will eventually get adopted, or all clients will adapt to work with a few, just like how blog sites syndicate in more than one RSS format.

Hm.. Hula-project already provides calendar support, but I do not know whether anyone has set one up yet.

Mozilla Calendar/Sunbird can already do a quick (although not automated) dump onto the ipod. just select all events then publish the calendar to the ipods calendar directory.

there is also a mozpod extension that appears to be underway for doing the contacts, although nothing actually available on that front yet.

Yes, a Google calendar would be great, and I'm just praying that the same design team that worked on gMail, aren't given this task - anyone else think the gMail screens are a bit, um, '90s look?
Let's have somthing that's a 'knockout' and easily 'skinned'.

Has anyone tried GMS Collaboration from Gordano (www.gordano.com)? We use it work and it does pretty much everything people have mentioned except RSS support - works with Outlook, Mozilla Calendar, Apple iCal, EventSherpa etc - using a iCal\vCal. You can even share you Calendars and Tasks from Outlook into the other clients! I use SMS alarms from it all the time - great for not being late at the weekend! It has a webmail client for calendaring also that works well in most browsers (I use Firefox and it's great).

you know what? integrating it with orkut's friends anniversaries. I'd never remember my friends birthdays...

Outlooks calendar sucks! majorly sucks! I hate it, I can't stand it, please don't use that as a model or template! I'm serious...

there are much better things out there.
Novell's is really nice, as well I always liked Lotus Notes way of doing things. especially the group functionality and team-based stuff.

You want to schedule a meeting for your team or group? put it in, and it gets marked on all their calendars, will also warn of conflicts (with public/private markers, etc)

group-based collaboration is really key too.
where are these apps? why hasn't someone made a nice web-based system like this yet?

I'd like to see one that actually displays well and doesn't abuse CSS to make text unredable, or lazyass div that screw up pages.

Calendar sharing and subscribing is inperative in my view. The Apple iCal model is wonderful for me, where others have shared out their calendars. I can see family member calendars, meetings for work, meetings for groups I want to follows and attend, sports calendars, etc. These are not part of my calendar, unless I choose to pull them in (such as holidays, etc.).

True syncing across multiple devices, possibly with this central calendar as the default resource. There are times when I do not have web access, but that should not keep me from syncing my calendar with other devices I own. Somebody needs to get syncing right, it may as well start here.

Whatever it looks like, it should have a Marcus Bains Line. No respectable calendar should be without this feature.

The killer is the synchronization with SyncML and mobile devices. Being an interested party, I hope they will integrate it with the open source synchronization platform Sync4j (www.sync4j.org)

someone said: "I'm looking for something to do - Google/Yahoo/Whoever show me *type of event* events within *radius* of *place* that will occur on or around *date or date range* and that costs *dollar amount*."

and someone reploed: come back in ten years. or more.

Or get a time machine. localendar.com has been offering calendar searches based on event zip, category, and distance since the 20th century.

I know it's kind of late to add a comment.. but here goes.

Those of you who think one calendar will "win" or "take off" are not being quite realistice. For whatever reason, there will be many different calendar implementations in the world. The iCalendar RFCs attempt to address this but it's not all there yet. That's why the Calendaring & Scheduling Consortium is trying to work on interop problems.

Guys, go check out www.planzo.com. I think it's on to something. It's more personal and less event oriented though.

Hmm. I feel helpless after reading this discussion. I was looking for pretty much the same thing as Jeremy, a cool calendar I could maneuver but most of the people on here are right about the interest not being that much. Not until I started working for an evite type company did I realize the need for this kind of calendar... There are a handful of people who are actually interested in calendaring this way which in this great big internet means zilch to any company.

My startup has just begun promoting a free web service that has a lot of what the people who have posted here are looking for (but clearly not everything. I've made a lot of notes, this is a great blog for our feature planning). You can check the service out at www.airset.com We provide personal and shared web based calendaring. The service syncs to Outlook and Palm on PCs and an iSync solution for Macs is coming. The next release will have RSS export and the one after that will have RSS import and iCal support. In addition to the web service, we are working on Java and Brew clients for most mobile phones that will sync with the web service. Alas, there has to be a catch, while the web service will remain free, the over-the-air sync to our mobile phone clients will be a paid monthly service (~$5/month). I hope you will check it out.

It would need to have a system of prioritizing the events you schedule.

For example, I might have a recurring poker game that I would miss if my karate class conflicts with it.

Also, or instead, it could do with colors assigned to various types of events, so I know at a glance that Thursday's solid blue block means I have to study for something (but the specifics would be in the text, whether it's for my boards, or just a quiz in anatomy) and intermittent green is something athletic, like a morning run or an afternoon at the stairmaster.

I'd like both, but at least the colors, as then I could just know that, oh, studying takes precedence over working out when they conflict, but I can never skimp on travel time (since that's outiside my control).

I found this page searching for a google calendar :)
All google's software i tried was not only what i wanted, but what i would have wanted if only i could think about it...google rules!

One thing I would love to see is appointment block color-coding so that you could easily see at a glance that there are 6 business appointments, 3 social appointments, 2 classes, 4 "honey-do" items, 7 things for the kids, etc., without having to carefully review each item. It would give a quick visual sense of the day, week, and/or month ahead.

Well I've been waiting for the same for some time now. The closest we so far have come is the browsing calendar in Google Desktop 2beta.... (not really what I'm looking for)

Go for it Google!!

Google Desktop only works on Windows. I run Suse Linux...no solution for me. I use MyYahoo's Calendar. Formerly I used also Yahoo's mail. After trying out Google Mail, no contest, I quickly changed to Google. I have tried some install on Apache and web publish calendar solutions. I prefer Yahoo's calendar, forget about servers and concentrate on my work. But I keep open both gmail and myyahoo.

Hey, Google guys, I NEED GOOGLE CALENDAR, and I NEED IT AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!

Best regards.

Frederic Busquier

or maybe Google could just hire these guys to make gCal...

http://www.kiko.com

I just don't see the point of all the excitement. Why not use an offline calendar? There are some great free ones. Or, even better, a paper calendar? You could "hack" it in any way, shape, or form you wanted. Someone want to enlighten me?

Try Trumba, it's an awesome calendar, great features et al. Google's will be good, but where is it?

I'd like to see the Google calendar and have appointment addresses, phone numbers etcetera linked to Google Earth. That could be really cool. For example, I have a meeting with XYZ client and want to take them out to lunch after the meeting. I click on the meeting event (containing the addres) and Google Earth flys to the address. I can then do a local search (or better yet just a button) for Italian or Chinese or whatever I want to find different dining choices nearby. Heck, that information could automatically be populated in the calendar event...

Dave,

An online calender you can get to from any computer, work, friends house, home, blackberry...you can't do that with an offline calender sadly :(

you guys are all talk and no action. Look into the depths of google. they have some project api's that you can get involved in. and open source stuff to get you started. grap the environment code and start work on your own calendar.

While it is possible for all of google products to interconnect, the actual process to do so may be harder than saying it. you want to get these features, instead of writing about it, do it.

I've been pleased with using Outlook linked with the Plaxo service that allows me to access my Outlook calendar, contacts and task list with my Sprint Sanyo MM 8300 phone.

Word for mobile device (and Outlook or other offline viewing mode) synchronization!

"I just don't see the point of all the excitement. Why not use an offline calendar? There are some great free ones. Or, even better, a paper calendar?"
Ask yahoo :)

what i find funny is that no-one has mentioned (unless i missed it) Mozilla Sunbird - it plugs into Thunderbird just fine, or can be used a standalone calendar.

one thing about easiness to use - especially we don't want to copy and paste between different programs/windows to manage calendar - automation will be the key to link google calendar with gmail ...

other software choice cannot really resolve this/ syncing online calendar easily

... still waiting calendar.google to be functional soon ....

Your list is good and no one is there now but I think there has been a lot of innovation in online calendars in the past few years. Have you looked at Trumba's OneCalendar? Trumba has created a powerful and useful calendar being used by schools, families, businesses, individuals, churches, et al. It doesn't meet all your needs today, but is headed in the right direction. You might want to experiment with the publishing options of Trumba's calendar for your site.

Phil, you ought to identify yourself as a Trumba employee.

Jeremy, Sorry, I should have. I wasn't trying to hide the fact. I liked the product so much I came to work here. Have you used Trumba's calendar?

Not yet. I'll definitely have a look.

Jeremy,
Let me know if you have any questions. You have my email. Our help section is quite good for detailed information.

any updates on when we can expect google calendar? i want it NOW!!!

I understand all the excitment about a future calendar at google, i have a questiosn though, is going to be linked to gmail, the same way yahoo has its calendar, notepad accessible through yahoo mail? I hope it will cause the only think keepin me from jumping to Gmail si actually the fact that i relie a lot of yahoo briefcase, calendar and notepad... which are great web apps by the way... i think people underestimate Yahoo mail and associated apps but they great!

Peace out
Lady Mo

This minute Google has a decent Calendar I am abandoning Yahoo for good. I have been with Yahoo practically from the beginning. Currently there email is slower then anything in the world and is sooooooo frustrating. I think Googles folks run circles around the Yahoo folks technilogically and guess what ... that is what is still most important at this stage of the internets development, no matter how much the Hollywood crowd screams and bellows.

I am eagerly waiting for a calendar to be used with my gmail, i want one program to do it all, i am so disorganized i just want a dang calendar, whats taking them so long? it's been almost a month since calendar.google.com went live!

-Hutz

yes please.................

Think having a good calendar is a vry helpful idea. I'd like it to have an alarm clock feature where it flashes or beeps a set no. of times to remind you. You could choose the setting, once, twice, 1 or 2 beeps, long beeps, short beeps, popup etc...

Would be a great help in these busy days.

Maybe an export into Excel or something? It would make inputting the same weekly, bi weekly event a lot easier.

We work in a company that require us to work 2 Saturdays per month. At the moment these Saturdays are specified by the MD and are all scribbled onto a wall chart in the office.

We need a place that can tell us who is working on which Saturday for when we need to swap with colleges, plan our life etc. It also needs to have the option of quickly pasting the names into 26 Saturdays for the whole year. Doing an event by event update would take forever.

Maybe you could have an event update and then an option of entering it across mulitple days with a simple tick box Calendar layout.

I'm sure other people will have similar needs for an online calendar. Sorry for not being technical, but hope this makes sense!

ps. If this already exists could you let me know? Cheers!

Hi. I have written an application that will sync Thunderbird contacts with your Ipod. http://davepaine.co.uk/CMS/content/view/27/69/. I hope you find it useful.

GMAIL INTEGRATION!

Something like Trumba is OK, at least by me.

makesure it callsme atmy email or cellfon skypeout or skype in or gtalk or gmail. im like alota fol il write it in weeks before then illforget it anyway. we need a secretary to read oour calendars..

Outafrogs has the right idea. You want complete automation. You should say "I will be here then, here then, etc." and then say "plan me a meeting with Foo".

If this were integrated with a project/task/TODO manager, this would completely rock. Your entire time/space life could be completely organized.

It drives me nuts that Yahoo's cal. doesn't tell me when the holidays are (including the greeting card ones). Isn't that something we used a paper cal. for? So why is something so basic missing from most programs?

Carl Sjogreen, the xml and java pioneer who made his name with Stylus Studido, will be announcing the launch of Google Calendar on Friday 9 Dec.

Check out Hipcal.com

gCalendar - a dream : /evil thought/

Will Google ever have a price tag that Bill can afford?

Google CRM - includes a calender :)
we've developed a CRM that looks and feels like a Windows desktop. It's a LAMP stack app with heavy use of Javascript (GUI to look like an OS) and can run on a USB device if there is no internet connection. When there is it will sync with the web based version. We have the solution now :)

I found hipcal.com (formerly mypimp), and meets all my calendar needs. I've tried a few, and left frustrated, but hipcal is already the standard of my friends and coworkers

Google tends to set up sub-domains for their key products (mail.google.com, maps.google.com etc.). If you try a non-existant domain you get a 404 (eg. http://zoopo.google.com/). But try http://calendar.google.com/!

Sunbird doesn't do anything close to what I want it to do. Most calendar programs don't. I agree, Google could make some major improvement in an area of applications that has gone stagnant. Who doesn't need help keeping organized? And Google says they want to organize ans sort the worlds information.

Personally, I'd be stoked if I could find a desktop program that works like the Notes feature on Google Desktop but stand alone. Simple, easy, ahhhh.

You said it friend! Have you heard anything... I need gCalendar, like London needs the sun...

What I really need is a simple admin system that would allow one person to do the initial set-up of calendars for all his friends/family/co-workers/resources (with their approval of course). Sort of an ad-hoc mix of Yahoo Groups, Address Book, and Yahoo Calendar.

The other calendar feature I'd love is much simpler: I want to just type in "US National Holidays" or "UK Bank Holidays" into the Google search field and get a simple list of those. Something as dry as the list at http://www.smilebox.co.uk

(How hard could that be?)

I've started this project call Online Agenda. I won Tech Fest at ITT Tech Albany with it. Unfortunately I've had to start over due to a major crash (I was to arrogant to do more frequent backups). You can see a sample at http://agenda.dawsdesign.com but it's probably a good thing i started over because the original used iframes. The new version will be 100% AJAX.

Greetings Jeremy

We would certainly have the combined intellectual resources required to make the ultimate Calender just from users on this board!

Cheers
Fonu

There's one feature I have yet to see in any of the online calendars. In fact, it may not be feasible. There are a few tasks I do with some degree of regularity. For example, I need to write a particular report every two or three months. I can have a task recur every two months, but that really only works if I write the report precisely every two months. If I wait three months before writing the report, the next reminder is then only a month away. Outlook gives you the option to have the next occurrence set for a specific interval from the completion of the task. So it doesn't matter when I finish my report, my next reminder will be two months from the time I check off that it has been completed.

That works great in a program that resides on your computer, although Mozilla Sunbird doesn't have this capability (yet), and neither does OSAF's "Chandler." I recognize that neither product is complete and that both will likely have something like that eventually. However, when it comes to online calendars and reminder services, it seems it would be harder to implement something like this. The program has to know when you complete the task. You would probably have to log in and check off the task. I suppose the service could just keep sending you an email each day or a text message until you log in and check off that task, which would be fine for me. But I'm not sure how many services would be willing to do something like that. Does anyone know of one? I'm hoping the good folks at Google figure out a way to make something like this possible. It's so much more flexible than a predetermined interval like "every two months on the 1st Monday of the month." That works great for some things, but not for everything.

I found this on digg so some of you might have seen this, but 30boxes is on a right track with a cool calendar: http://www.30boxes.com/

Check it out...

-Bart

Why I want a web based calendar.

1. Offsite safety, efficiency, access from anywhere. No need to "sinc". Just go on line.

2. Why should Google, Yahoo offer for free? Calendar would have two looks. First look is just your inhouse business appointments. Click of a button would display other advertized events available that day based on your checked off interests and/or specific event requests filled out on a biography that could also show advertisement as you are filling in/updating your information like vacation ideas in your area, sales in your area, forums in your area etc. the possibilites are endless and you are creating a new avenue to advertise on a place that business people look at every day!!!!! I'm a lawyer and my firm would love to have a website calendar. Win Win!!!!!!! A calendar is a focused daily possibility to sell something!!! DO IT.

A good reason for Google to do this? Well, like everything else they've launched recently (Pack, Gmail etc.) it would really screw Microsoft. As soon as Gmail gets groupware functions, (coupled with the new Gmail for Domains that's now in beta) Outlook is dead

So. Google really is going to lauch a calendar. I suspected it when calendar.google.com started to route to the main page, and noted that a googlebot kept grabbing my online iCal file. The beta is apparently going on with around 200 people, and the pics have now been leaked.
The leaked pics follow....
http://jaduncan.net/google-calendar-cl2-leaked-pictures

Fix some problems with Microsoft Outlook Calendar:

1. Ability to invite anyone to an event regardless of if they are using Outlook or not. Click accept, reject, tentative.
2. Only allow tentative is the organizer allow it. It is annoying to get tentative responses when you want a YES or NO.
3. Ability to share resources like projectors and conference rooms.
4. Ability to see resource calendars.
5. Easily add directions and maps to a meeting.
6. Easily add agendas to a meeting
7. Allow others to add comments to the event - Live!
8. Link to Skype, Netmeeting, AIM, etc.
9. Link to Live Meeting, conferencing software, easily.
10. SYnc with Outlook

Thanks!

I think it will be a great idea - do you know if Google are really going to do this - or is it just speculation ?

I've been using the Hotmail Live Beta with Calendar and Tasks / Notes - they've made it like Outlook Excahnge (OWA) look and feel - but it's really clunkly and slow - probably due to the advert banners. These also take up a lot of room and don't give the user space to view calendar / emails properly.

Google have certainly got it right with the way they display adverts - ( just as links) that are non obtrusive.

I would pay for sure to use Google Calendar - am hooked on Google mail - wouldnt mind if they asked for a small fee for that too.

It is one of the most needed function in online mobile time.
but it is not alive now...there is still ups and downs
hope it will get fixed soon.
KAI

It looks like today is your day! Google Calendar is now available at http://www.google.com/calendar, but lookout, it's cra..wl..ing. The servers are getting absolutely hammered, and Google has even redirected the traffic back to it's main site to try to slow the frenzy.

What's cool is that you can add public calendars as well as private ones, and even select who can post on your public calendars. This is useful to me because I'm involved in a lot of local user group events and wanted one central location where local leaders could post their event info. Pretty cool.

Google's CL2 calendar is online and available now. It looks reasonable but in terms of useability, it's horrendously clunky. Compare it to the competition and it's basic functionality is hard to use. I'm still recommending 30Boxes to anyone that asks.

Yahoo has had that facility long back. I dont see any reason I want to switch over to Google calendar yet. I dont see anything new in it.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12298116/

Yes, it's cool online tool. I am using it these days!
Only a little shortcoming for I must connect to the internet to use it.

It's here it's here... it's finally here!!!
www.google.com/calendar

I hope you know we all expect you to post a follow-up of how Google Calendar met/didn't meet your expectations. Seeing as you posted the most publicized impetus for gCal, your opinion on their final product is crucial. Bring it!

Wow, it looks like a great calendar-addict coomunity gathers here. Wish I'd known sooner... Anyway, one important word did not come up in entire discussion: patents. Google calendar is (as I'm sure many others are) crippled because some fundamental patents are held by Microsoft and some by others. I wonder if some of the great calendars mentioned around here are licensees of those IP-holders or if they are running a risk of being squashed at some point in time. That could well be an explanation why no decent calendaring application can be a free service.

Oops, I was hoping that "your weblog URL" input field is good for something...

My take on Google's Calendar being crippled:
me-techie.blogspot.com/2006/04/google-calendar-why-did-it-take-so.html

I have been reading through all of the comments about the need for a do-it-all calendar solution. Judging from all of the disparate "must have" features helps me understand why there is no de facto solution.

We at Infuzer have been tackling calendar communication issues for many years and what we have discovered is... no solution can make everyone happy because there isn't even a cohesive approach to how time is handled on computers, handhelds and smartphones. How many people adjust their laptop computer's clock to reflect the time zone they are traveling to? What about your Blackberry?

Hi,
want to sync both ways between Outlook and Google Calendar?
Try RemoteCalendars!

http://sourceforge.net/projects/remotecalendars
remotecalendars.sourceforge.net/google.htm

I've been using the embeded AirSet calendar on a couple of my musician friends sites and overall it's been good. However, after six months since reporting it to AirSet, the RSS feed still does not work right or validate and so I've had to abandon using FeedBurner's new and very cool email subscribe service (set up to send calendar updates) until AirSet fix their feed. Unfortunately I have no idea when they're actually going to do that.

In the meantime, I've checked out Google's calendar which looks promising but alas lacks a list view which is crucial to the layout of the sites.

Trumba looks to be the best so far but paying $9.95 a month for it to get rid of their big yellow ad is a drawback since both AirSet and Google are free.

Anybody know of any other embeded calendars that offer list view and RSS feeds?

Your wish is Google's command.

Glad to see you got what you wanted. I'm just blogging today about Google's new features and sure enough you were on boat with it. Figures :)

Guys, I've been using all sorts of calendaring for years now, starting with Casio machines then Sharp IQ's, Psions, Ipaq's and Smartphones etc. I've found server solutions such as Plaxo very good, but am frustrated that those guys never bothered (yet) to put any emphasis on integration with Mac/Linux on the calendaring side. XNC are good in that they support most platforms for a sync solution, but they charge for it, more than I want to pay. I have to say that after a while I give the benefit of the doubt to Airset, because it does lots more than just calendaring and is the easiest to use sharing solution I can find. However, it still doesn't do a Mac/Linux sync which I find a pain. I have contrived workarounds, but these are not ideal. My situation? At work I have to use Lotus Notes for email, and an IBM mainframe green screen solution for calendar. I now have a program which will sync the mainframe to notes and noes to my blackberry, but that's as far as it goes. So, I wrote an excel macro to read the mainframe diary and load it into Outlook, I run Airset and this syncs with Outlook then sends me an email at 06:00 every morning to tell me what's coming up. Trouble is the m/f to Outlook macro is a manual process, so if I'm not on the corporate network it doesn't happen. I love Airset's map capability, makes a lot of sense, and perhaps heralds some future smart thinking by them. They also have a mobile solution (chargeable) but it only works in the US. C'mon guys, there's more people in the rest of the world than there are in the US - think of the revenue streams!

So, Airset (which can embed into my websites) would be ideal if: 1) Make mobile solution more global. 2) produce a sync engine for Linux/Mac (top priority!). I used to sync my P910i phone via iSync with my Mac Powerbook just by walking into the house and putting it on the table, (Bluetooth) so I could have an any-platform any-device solution shared calendar if that sync engine existed - how hard is that?!

Rob - would it be possible to get a copy of the excel macro you wrote to sync Mainframe Diary to Outlook? I have exactly the same setup where I work and it would be very useful.

Many thanks.

Abe.