Wednesday, October 5, 2005
What Google Calendar May Bring
If Google Calendar indeed surfaces in the near future, what could it – should it – bring? As mentioned before, the sub-domain calendar.google.com exists, albeit it only redirects to the Google homepage for now, and Gcalendar.com has been registered through Data Pocket, a registration service Google used before.
First, I can see two major applications: a calendar application on its own, or a search feature for other calendars (it could also be a mixture of the two). I’ll focus on the first option for now. It may be the next step in completing the Google OS and its Google Office, strongest competitor to Microsoft.
Quickdat, my own little calendar application of some years ago. Would the Gcalendar main screen look anything like it? A Google image search for [online calendar] reveals some more possibilities.
I’m not a big online calendar user (not yet, anyway), so I’m not sure what’s missing in the market, or what important features must be in any calendar web app. I could imagine a few:
- The option to add different pieces of information (text notes, maybe images or sounds) to any day
- Email alerts for birthdays, appointments, and any other special day you mark in your calendar
- National holidays flagged in your calendar, depending on which country/ state you live in
- Sharing of events with friends or groups – maybe Andy Baio’s Upcoming.org served as inspiration for a feature or two
- It could display important dates, localized to where you’re at and personalized to your interested, crawled from public web resources
- It could be integrated with Google Personalized Search (you’d see what you searched for on specific days in your calendar)
- The ability to tag events with keywords and let others search for them (e.g. when the band Weezer is in town, the tags could be “music”, “tour”, “weezer”, and so on)
- It could be integrated with Google Maps so that clicking on an appointment in the calendar takes you to a specific position on Google Maps
- It could be integrated with Google Maps so that you could enter the geo-location of an event marked as public, and others could see it on Google Maps “events” view
- All in the latest Google look-and-feel, shown in Gmail and Google Groups 2
- Smaller “time"-related tools, like a time-zones converter
- Social “zeitgeist” features like “Most popular event” or “hippest location today”
- As usual, the whole caboodle would be offered free, and display AdSense (i.e. more or less related links that mean cash for Google)
On a technical side, we could expect:
- High loading speed via Ajax, Iframes, and similar tricks (that would make it a non-accessible web application in terms of standardized HTML, of course)
- RSS and Atom feeds
- Drag & Drop customization
- Auto-saving and similar add-ons via Ajax
- Standard export/ import features (I’ve heard vCal is one such standard)
- Cross-application features bundling it with Blogger.com, Gmail, Orkut, Google Maps, Google News, and similar services
- A Web API (maybe REST instead of SOAP this time)
- Possibly, an invite-only beta phase
Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo said: “There’s been so little innovation in the world of on-line calendars these last few years. Perhaps Google getting into the act would finally change that.” But don’t hold your breath, as there may be some more days of wait until the announcement. InternetNews speculates we’ll be seeing something the end of this month: “There’s a big invitation-only gathering at Google’s Mountain View, Calif., offices on Oct. 26 and 27. (...) The search goliath used its first press open house in May to introduce Google Earth, and it may save this unveiling, as well.”
I’d like to hear your opinions, feature wishes and prophecies.
[Thanks to Tony Ruscoe, Alex K., and Ilana Tamir in the forum.]
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