Arranging meetings via the Web, without online registration

Earlier today, Doug Kaye tweeted: "Is there a good online service for scheduling multi-person meetings and calls that doesn't require everyone to register?" Later on that day, he tweeted about two good possibilities: When is Good and Meet-O-Matic.

Elevate America? The missing agenda item

For Microsoft to claim that our economy can be turned around by teaching "computer fundamentals," and then listing word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, Web design, and database as those fundamentals...hey, what about calendaring and scheduling? Once again it gets the bum's rush on the short list (just like the way phone companies & phone makers ignore and neglect the calendaring apps they ship) . Too bad, because as I've said, managing our time is a key to economic turnaround.

Sunbird development halts

Mozilla is halting work on further enhancements to Sunbird. I saw that one coming. The question is, which modular open source calendar will carry on? Or will we have to settle for an integrated calendar/email client, such as Lightning or Mulberry?

Clouding up iPhone sync

From the SpanningSync blog: the new GoogleSync for iPhone makes your iPhone stop syncing contacts and calendars with your Mac.

I bet it also disables iPhone sync with Windows-based calendars via iTunes.

Bug or feature?

Towards valid iCalendar feeds

Bravo to all concerned on the start of a project to create tests to make sure that iCalendar feeds are validated, the same way that RSS feeds are validated. Valid RSS led to much greater adoption of RSS. The same can happen for iCal.

Read-only offline Google Calendar

TechCrunch: "The new offline [Google] calendar application doesn’t allow you to create, edit or delete events."

Harumph. Beta software!

Doc knocks Apple iCal, MobileMe

I don't want to turn this blog into an Apple-bashing service, but when someone as respected as Doc Searls says this, you know that Apple has work to do:

"iCal has been improved minimally since its introduction years ago, and screws up coordinating with the iPhone (for example, by failing to associate the colors of calendars in iCal with the same calendars on the phone, and in fact randomly changing them on the phone with every sync — and failing to use the phone to tell the computer which time zone the user is in, which would be handy)."

UPDATE: Cringely took a timely swipe at Microsoft that made me think of this post.

FuseCal acquires iFreeBusy

Public Display, providers of FuseCal, a calendar syncing service I wrote about last year, has acquired ifreebusy.com and will continue to run the service, which had been set to shut down last year.

This is great news. Calendar interoperability needs stable and inexpensive (even free) free/busy services upon which to innovate. It's great that this can happen building upon Neil Jensen's pioneering ifreebusy service.