Charlene Li of Forrester research has a blog post entitled Google Calendar creates a platform for "time" applications where she writes
Having trialed a half dozen of them (including Airset, CalendarHub, 30Boxes, Planzo, and SpongeCell), Google Calendar
is truly a best of breed in terms of ease of use and functionality.
Here’s a quick overview of what’s different about the new product:
- Manage multiple calendars. ....
- Easy to use. ....
- Sharing. ....
- Open platform.
I think this is the most interesting aspect of Google's calendar. The
iCal standard along with RSS means that I will be able to synch my work
calendar with my Google calendar. Although tie-ins with programs like
Outlook aren’t yet available, Carl Sjogreen, Google Calendar’s product
manager, said that such functionality will be coming "soon". Google is
also partnering with Trumba to
enabled "one-click" addition of events to your calendar (Trumba already
works with calendar products from Yahoo!, Outlook, MSN Hotmail, and
Apple). Also promised are synching capabilities to mobile phones. Carl
also said that an API was in the works, which would enable developers
to create new products on top of Google Calendar.
I've always thought that Web-based calendaring and event-based
products haven't hit the sweet spot with end users because they are too
much work to use for little benefit. The reason I use calendaring
software at work is mainly to manage meetings. If I didn't have to
attend meetings I'd never use the calendaring functionality of Outlook.
In my personal life, the only times calendaring software would have
been useful is integrating invitation services like eVite into my calendars at work and/or at home (I use both Yahoo! Mail and Windows Live Mail). However either eVite
doesn't provide this functionality or it's unintuitive since I've never
discovered it. So web-based calendaring software has been pretty much a
bust for me. AJAXifying it doesn't change this in any way.
On the other hand, I could probably build the integration I want between my work calendar and my eVite
calendar if they had an API [and I was invited to enough parties to
make this a worthy excercise]. It seems there is now an awareness of
this in the industry at the big three (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft)
which is going to turn online calendaring into an interesting space
over the next few months. Google Calendar
is a step in the right direction by providing RSS feeds and announcing
a forthcoming API. Yahoo! is already thinking about the same thing and also announced an upcoming Calendar API last month. As for Windows Live, our CTO has been talking to folks at work about using RSS+SSE as a way to share events and I'm sure they are paying attention [or at least will now that both Yahoo! and Google have thrown down].
With the increased use of RSS by Web-based calendaring applications
perhaps it is time for RSS readers to also become more calendar aware?