Sharing calendars via Facebook? Tighten your settings

If you use Facebook to share calendar info with others, you must read my first column for Windows Secrets, all about how to tighten your Facebook privacy settings.

Sorry Nexus One phone owners: No .ics support in calendar

Calendar Review reports that Android-based calendars on the Google can't handle meeting invites sent by .ics file -- a standard way people have been inviting people to meetings and activities for many years.

The workaround for Nexus One users, of course, is to deal with the invites from a Google Web calendar...but, what a pain!

After last week's news that Android has no calendar API, it's time for me to award -2 SwampDrain points to Google and Android collectively.

I wonder if Google is simply hoping everyone adopts hCalendar. Good luck with that! Better to support the old and the new and urge people to modernize, rather than try to force the change.

I wonder if other Android-based calendars are similarly unable to read .ics files. One commenter in my post on the Droid calendar search problem noted that Android-based phone provider HTC provides its own calendar instead of the standard Android one, so maybe HTC's calendar not only provides in-calendar search, but .ics file support as well. Does anyone reading this know?

hCalendar data now appears in some Google search results

I noted with interest an April 28 post at the Microformats blog, stating that Google now supports hCalendar. This Google Webmaster Central blog post from January 22 suggests that more and more Google search results are including hCalendar-formatted event information which may more easily flow into our calendars. However I have yet to experience this in my everyday Googling. If you have reaped any benefit from this, please leave a comment here.

Developers can't access Android calendar data, but iPhone situation improves

For a company that boasts about how open it is, Google has just done a great about-face on one front: calendar-sharing. According to Fabrizio Capobianco:

"There is no public calendar API on Android. Unbelievable."

In the same post, Fabrizio reports that Apple's iPhone OS is going to open up the iPhone calendar for developers. At least that was what Apple promised at the iPhone OS 4.0 announcement. Maybe now we can hope for a working version soon of direct iPhone-to-iPhone calendar-sharing via Bump.

Tungle adds directories, group meetings

Anyone reading this using Tungle? If so, you'll be interested in today's news from the company. The TechCrunch post I'm pointing to here also mentions Jiffle, another Web-based calendar-sharing competitor I hadn't heard about.