Power grid test could disrupt some clocks

Time keeps on ticking, ticking, ticking, into the future. Except when it won't, according to this proposal. As if we don't have enough synchronization problems!

Schema.org

I just learned of this page at schema.org. Could be helpful to someone reading this.

Calamander acquired & shuttered

Easy come, easy go. One of the most recent calendar-sharing service startups, Calamander, has been acquired and the service halted.

Producers of calendar-sync silos such as MobileMe, Windows 7 and Google Android had no comment.

MobileMe reboot to ship for free this fall

If I read this live blog of this morning's WWDC keynote, Apple MobileMe will return, totally rewritten, this fall, for free. I stand ready to award SwampDrain points closer to shipping.

Tell Salesforce to improve its Outlook sync

Currently "under consideration" at Salesforce.com: Supporting sync of recurring events with Microsoft Outlook. Salesforce will implement it, if enough people ask for it. This issue has been public on Salesforce's Web site at least since September of last year. Too many recurring events fill up our calendars, but that's no excuse not to support them.

Facebook now supports hCalendar microformat

Last month Facebook added support for the hCalendar microformat to all events created inside Facebook. This will help calendar interoperability and sharing between the Facebook world and the rest of the world, so I'm awarding +1 SwampDrain point to Facebook...but remember to check those privacy settings!

Old Sidekick calendars to hit sharing brick wall May 31

On May 31, the troubled T-Mobile Sidekick phones based on the Danger platform will no longer be able to share calendars with the cloud or anything else. Vague plans exist to offer upgrades to new Android-based Sidekicks, but that may be cold comfort to those of you Calendar Swamp readers fond of your original Sidekicks. SwampDrain points to T-Mobile: -2.

Podcast #11: Calamander

Calamander is the first innovation in calendar synchronization I've seen in a long time. Listen to Calendar Swamp podcast #11 (34:15, 64MB) with Calamander co-founders Scott Sikora and Derek Robbecke. And check out the Calamander beta. (Unless you have an iPad. The Calamander beta currently requires Flash, which the iPad doesn't support.)

My conversation with Scott and Derek arose out of my previous post here, which concerned Dipity, as Calamander implements its own innovative and welcome timeline view of multiple schedules.

After a long drought of no progress on calendar sharing, a flood may be coming. On Friday I attended the intriguing Inbox Love conference, where calendaring came up several times, most notably during a presentation on AwayFind.

Also, this week rumor has it that Apple will announce a refresh of MobileMe. When I talked with Scott and Derek on February 10, little was known of this so we were mostly bemoaning the continuing lack of a MobileMe API. Perhaps that is about to change.

Dipity makes me want timeline views in calendars

While the winter of my calendar-sharing discontent continues, I am inspired by a service called Dipity, which lets anyone create timelines on a Web page. It suggests to me that all calendars might benefit from adding a timeline view. So when sharing becomes as easy as we want it to be, there will be cooler ways to view our shared calendars than simply replicating daily/weekly/monthly views on paper. For now, Dipity also offers an interesting way to scan developments in the Middle East.

Apple sharing problems again

At CES I acquired the sinking feeling that my problems sharing data between my PCs and River's Mac can be attributed to poor standards support by the Apple AirPort that links the Mac to the rest of my network. I haven't proven it yet, but here's a story that lends fuel to the fire, at least by implication.

Funambol offers free syncing for life

mobile Funambol's mobile calendar sync service is now free for life. I don't use Funambol, but if you do, check this out.

Share everything -- except schedules? -- at CES

I walked around the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) halls today and found many, many booths talking about how much families can share using consumer electronics. Photos, videos, music, documents...the list goes on and on. And then it stops. It never includes schedules.

Here's Samsung's "Allshare" display:

Here's Microsoft's booth:

I could also post similar big banners found at the TV and mobile phone manufacturers' booths, but you get the idea.

Only Casio talked about sharing schedules, but basically it was vaporware to help promote a low-energy reboot of Bluetooth radio technology (including the return of the smart watch!):

To further epitomize the pathetic progress being made on calendar sharing, the Consumer Electronics Association, which puts on the CES show, added its own calendar to the FollowMe MyCES iPhone app, but if you want to sync anything you selected or scheduled in that iPhone to your iPhone's own calendar, you had to individually select each event one at a time rather than having a way to sync all selected events at once. Arrgh!

Once again, the consumer electronics industry ignores calendar sharing, and arguably, with the withdrawal of Microsoft's Home Server last year, has taken a step backward. Perhaps only a massive data breach of Google, exposing the personal appointments of millions of people, could wake people up.

Meanwhile, the Microsoft Windows 7 booth focuses on this "gallery" of form factors rather than focusing on helping people simplify their schedules or anything less abstract:

(Standard disclaimer: Yes, go ahead and use Google Calendar, Microsoft Live or Apple MobileMe to share schedules. If others who you want to share schedules with don't have problems with that. A lot of people do.)

(Second standard disclaimer: Yes, home consumer electronics represent a single point of failure. But there are ways to back up critical data securely to the cloud without resorting to Google, or even to just securely back up data to some of your other devices.)

Simplifying Outlook calendar export

Good news from CNET's Worker's Edge blog: Free Outlook add-in simplifies data export. Including Outlook calendars.

Calendar-sharing Webcast set for Dec. 7

Jon Udell's upcoming Harvard talk on calendar sharing will be Webcast on December 7 at 12:30 p.m. Eastern time.

Linux-based calendars

TechNewsWorld recently reviewed some Linux-based calendars. No info on interoperability here, but those readers who run Linux might find this of interest.

Calendar interop obscured by cloud

Calendar interoperability sometimes is a casualty of moving calendars around from one cloud service to another. Jon Udell tells a sad tale of calendar subscriptions disappearing at a small nonprofit near him in New Hampshire.

Any readers using a Mac Mini as a calendar server?

At some point the Mac Mini might be an cost-effective option for my desired in-house calendar server. Is anyone out there using it? Post any experiences you've had here.

CalConnect publishes introduction to Internet calendaring

CalConnect, the consortium promoting Internet calendar standards, has published an introduction to Internet calendaring.

Why not Apple iCal for Windows?

I'd welcome a version of Apple iCal for Windows. So would Zack Whittaker at ZDNet.

Calendar of the Future

While we struggle in the swamp of today's incomplete calendar interoperability, others daydream about -- what? Rip-and-replace what we carry around with something new? Not gonna happen any time soon. And with cloud-calendar leader Google turning more evil by the moment, who will safeguard the privacy and integrity of our calendars in the cloud, some of the most precious information we carry around?

Maybe my recent appearance on Cranky Geeks rubbed off on me a little bit. Okay, back to the quest for better interoperability!

Hallelujah! Bump now lets iPhones share events

It's a joyous day here at the Swamp. Bump for the iPhone now allows direct sharing of events with other iPhones. Stay tuned for some followup analysis of just how much of my own swamp has been newly drained. (Quite a lot, I suspect.)

Rain in the clouds

From the Spanning Sync blog:

"Data loss and corruption is a serious problem for Google Apps users. Browse through the Google Apps help forums and you'll find hundreds of posts from users who have lost their data and need help."

Of course, Spanning Sync has a new product designed to help you keep your data safe, so take this pitch with a grain of salt. But the myth of your data being safer in the cloud than in the device you're carrying is looking a bit shopworn. Those of us who want our calendar data always available ignore this news at our peril.

The Scheduled Web, and more on thin CalDAV servers

It's been a quiet month but two things caught my attention ... within minutes of each other:

• Nova Spivack's blog post from May 6: The Birth of the Scheduled Web.
• Lincoln's comment (and the previous 7 comments) on my October 2008 post, Quest for a Thin CalDAV Server.

I'm also still contemplating what can be accomplished with the new CalDAV support in my iPhone 4.0 software. Is anyone out there doing any interesting and new calendar sharing with it? Or just untethering more from PC-and-Mac-based iTunes?

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.

GooSync free version returns

The free version of GooSync is back on the market six months after it was discontinued in favor of a paid version. GooSync is a server based synchronization service that allows you to synchronize many mobile devices over-the-air with Google Calendar, as well as Google tasks (as Google widgets) and Google contacts.

Eben Moglen sounds alarm about cloud-based calendar sharing

Free software advocate Eben Moglen raises troubling questions about placing one's calendar in the cloud.

Now Up-To-Date company closing

Now Up-To-Date, an obscure calendar/contact management system for Mac and Windows, is heading into history with the recent announcement that publisher Now Software is closing its doors. I only wrote about it once here, way back in 2005. BusyMac has a way to migrate Now Up-To-Date users to the Mac-only BusyCal.

iSchedule draft published at the IETF

From July 2008:

The iSchedule Technical Committee will develop a proposal for the Internet Scheduling Protocol (iSchedule) which will specify a binding from the iCalendar Transport-independent Interoperability Protocol (iTIP) to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

March 8, 2010: The first draft proposal for iSchedule is published by the Internet Engineering Task Force.

Calendar standards folks, feel free to explain the significance of this in the comments to this post!

Amahi home network calendar sharing

FLOSS Weekly just posted a show about Amahi, a home network calendar sharing server. It requires a PC running Linux, and sounds like a summer project to someone like me, but it's encouraging to see some movement on the home network calendar-sharing front. Has anyone reading Calendar Swamp installed Amahi? If so, please post a comment here.

Ill-mannered app disables Google calendar sync

According to the Spanning Sync blog, bad behavior from a single application was causing all syncs to and from Google Calendar to fail for calendar users.

Plancast: So far, yet another patch of swamp

So after reading Dave Winer's plug for Plancast, I signed up.

This helps me how? I can visit this site and see friends' upcoming event schedules, but I can't subscribe to iCal feeds of these schedules. Calendar Swamp awards Plancast a SwampDrain penalty of -1 point. Just say no to visiting yet more Web sites to look at event info!

The always-in-sync question

While we try to get all calendars to share with each other -- a struggle with no end in sight -- progress occurred in another area: how to get a calendar in your pocket that's always in sync with a cloud-based calendar.

Apple's MobileMe for the iPhone was one of the first services offered to make this a reality. But MobileMe costs extra money, and yet it's still not always up and running.

Now here comes Google's Android platform, and at least one (or is that every?) Android phone out there that apparently keeps the local calendar in continuous sync with Google Calendar on the Web, at least according to Tim O'Reilly. Quoting Tim:

"No need to sync address book and calendar. Everything's always up to date."

And unlike MobileMe, there's no extra charge for this.

UPDATE: And as reader John Gordon points out, no Android required here. Just Google Calendar and Google Sync, on any mobile device they already support. Here all this time I didn't realize it!

Power Search fills Android calendar search gap

My quick scan of news about the Google Nexus One phone reveals no word of in-calendar search in this supposedly greatest Android phone ever. But I dug around some more and found a free third-party Android plug-in called Power Search, released last fall, that provide this feature across various Android phone local data. So while it's still ridiculous for Google not to provide this feature natively in Android, at least there are ways to get this local search, apparently.

Getting categorial about the iPhone calendar

Following up on the update to my last post, the native iPhone calendar can assign new events to a category, but only if that category is created by iCal for the Mac (or presumably Outlook) and then synched to the iPhone. If you don't use either iCal for the Mac or Outlook, no categories on the iPhone. I wonder if the rumored Apple tablet will allow category creation independently? That in itself wouldn't be enough to get me to buy a tablet, however. I just want the iPhone calendar to do it without a mind-meld with either Outlook or iCal for the Mac.

Update: Well I stand corrected! After doing a few more syncs, I was able to bring multiple calendars onto the iPhone and now can create new events using any of those calendars. This works because Google Sync is mimicking the Exchange (Outlook) protocol on its end. So it works! Categories rock!! (Just they originally did on the Palm calendar.) And yes, Windows Mobile was playing catchup.

Nuevasync does handheld tricks with multiple Google calendars

Kudos to Nuevasync to close out the year and match the kudos I gave the company at the start of 2009. This time, Nuevasync allows Windows Mobile calendar users to assign a Google calendar to a category in their WinMo calendar, making it easy to manage multiple Google calendars in the (Windows) palm of one's hand. Let's see the iPhone do that! (It can't: the iPhone native calendar doesn't have categories.) The new Nuevasync service is $25 a year -- a fair price.

Score one for Windows Mobile ... after a verry long drought!

Update: It's true, as a commenter to this post says, that the iPhone can merge multiple Google calendars into one iPhone calendar. But the new Nuevasync also lets mobile users assign events to a particular category which then feeds back into respective category, and the native iPhone calendar (still) can't do that.

State of the Swamp, 2010

There's still so much swamp to be drained.

Latest case in point: I'm preparing to attend my first Consumer Electronics Show in five years. For years, CES and similar trade shows have provided a Web-based event planner to add show activities to a personalized calendar. After selecting their events, attendees have a choice to export this calendar, purportedly to iCal format.

This I did today. But like so many other supposed iCal files, this one can't be properly imported into standard iCal-compliant calendars such as Google Calendar or Mozilla.

At least at the beginning of 2010, we have a new diagnostic tool, the iCalendar Validator. Running my exported CES file through the Validator reveals that the file scored 75 out of 100 points, accompanied by this warning: "This calendar has major problems; many applications will reject this calendar."

I would guess that one application will accept the calendar just fine: Microsoft Outlook. But looking at the text of the CES calendar, the beginning states "BEGIN:VCALENDAR BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0."

vCal is an older, less forgiving version of the iCal standard. It's been the topic of a long comment thread here. It's sad that organizations of the stature and importance of the Consumer Electronics Association (producers of CES) are still using vCal, and worse that it gets billed as iCal when only Outlook iCal is likely to be speaking that dialect.

I wonder if it's possible to use simple search-and-replace commands in Notepad to make the CES calendar work in Google Calendar. I'm going to try. But all the time, I will be wondering, after this year of cloud computing, how come the top U.S. technology show doesn't support the top cloud calendar format?

Update: If one views the source code of the CES Web site, it's obvious that it is created using the /Microsoft ASP.net format. The incompatibility culprit here is Microsoft!

Calendar as marketing tool

You know those free printed calendars we come across this time of the year? Now they're going online. Tylenol has one at tylenolcalendar.com, and it's strictly a marketing vehicle. Every week or so there's a coupon to print out. It only shows one month at a time. And of course there's no true sharing with any other calendar service or software, just some ways to spam the calendar to others via email, Facebook and the like.

I hope the next marketer to try this discovers iCal feeds!

Droid calendar search: FAIL (Android too)

I looked at a Motorola Droid this morning, and it shares the same flaw as Google's Android operating system: you can't search through your mobile calendar!

The press coverage of the Droid completely overlooks the native calendar. As usual, calendaring is the immensely practical application that gets no attention. Nevertheless, previous mobile phone platforms -- BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, iPhone -- at least let you search the calendar. Why not Droid? Why not Android?

The best my local Verizon store manager could say was, watch for other native calendars to be developed for the Droid.

But how realistic is that? Even if someone else offers an improved native calendar, could it be brought up from the Android home page instead of the default Android calendar?

I couldn't believe the one reviewer who said Droid has "superior in-device search" to the iPhone.

The market does need alternatives to the iPhone, to keep Apple on its toes. Droid isn't that alternative -- not from a calendaring angle.

I don't blame Motorola or Verizon. This is their release of Google's platform. That's what really amazes me about all this. Google is THE SEARCH COMPANY. It has no excuse to NOT offer search of its Android calendar.

Even when Google's providing device access to its cloud-based Google Calendar, Google comes up short. I wrote back on July, even on the iPhone, the Web version of Google Calendar is not searchable, unlike its desktop counterpart. That is still the case today.

A robust native calendar is essential. I've experienced enough recent outages of Google Calendar to remind me that the cloud is best used as a sync point for calendars -- but 24x7 calendaring is best served up right on the phone or other mobile device.

Opening up Outlook 2010

Will calendar sharing benefit from having the file format for Microsoft Outlook 2010 be open? I don't know. Time will tell.

GooSync sinks free version

The free version of GooSync is discontinued as of today. My SwampDrain sensibilities are unhappy and take back one (-1) of the two points awarded back in 2007. Although, in fairness, I haven't used GooSync since I abandoned all flavors of Outlook.

Apology of the week

Microsoft apologizes and says it was able to recover "most, if not all" the lost calendar data for users of its Sidekick service.

No dollar amount has been given on the damage done to cloud calendaring. But hey, Google Calendar continues to have some downtime, but soldiers on anyway.

How to get events into social networks

With the proliferation of social networks, services to help publish events across them are a good idea. Calendar Review notes one such service, Active Data Calendar.

Danger Will Robinson

Cloud Calendar Fail: Sidekick Owners Get Bad News — Phone Data Is Gone Forever.

Danger lives up to its name, by an unintended route.

Tungle improved

Tungle is making some welcome improvements; worth checking out.

Sync between iPhone calendar and Google Calendar

I'm not sure how I missed it before, but I've now successfully used CalDAV sync between my iPhone and my Google Calendar. However, when I add an event on the iPhone, I don't appear to have a way to direct the event to a particular calendar defined in my Google Calendar. I'm not sure if this is a limitation of CalDAV or not. Does anyone know?

Yahoo! Calendar syncs with iPhone

New from Yahoo!: Sync your Yahoo! Calendar with the iPhone. No desktop Apple iCal required (never did figure out how to dispense with it in the case of Google Calendar). I've got to check this out, as soon as I can find the time.

FuseCal goes dark

Synchronizing calendars is a tough problem -- tougher than mere interoperability, tougher than simply publish-and-subscribe. Those who undertake to do it successfully probably deserve the highest number of SwampDrain points that this mere blog could possibly bestow.

Thus it is with a heavy heart that I must report the shuttering last month of FuseCal. During my busy summer, it escaped my notice. Obviously each calendar service must make its numbers to survive, and when one doesn't, it reflects upon the sorry state of the continuing lack of interoperability between calendars, the continuing complexity of calendar interoperability, and the lack of a clarion call from consumers for easy calendar interactions -- whether in the cloud, on desktops, or in our pockets.

The passage of FuseCal also takes with it into limbo the assets of iFreeBusy, which set out to solve a simpler problem: that of providing an easy place to post one's free and busy information.

Now it falls back upon CalConnect to continue to hammer out calendar interoperability standards which can become the basis for more progress and innovation in this area.

Searching calendars on the iPhone

Basically, if you want to search your calendar on the iPhone, you'd better be using the native calendar app. Why? Because other calendars you can run on the phone -- such as Google Calendar -- incredibly don't provide a way to search the calendar! I couldn't believe this when I first discovered it. After all, it's trivial to search your Google Calendar on a regular Web browser via the prominent "search my calendars" button at the top. But Google Calendar as it runs on the iPhone has no such feature.

Now in fairness, Apple only added this ability to the native iPhone calendar with the recent release of the iPhone 3.0 software that came with my iPhone 3 GS. So it's not like the iPhone could do this at all before that. But given the immense popularity of the iPhone, it's critical that Google add this feature to the iPhone implementation of its own calendar. After all, Google is a search company!

We'll probably see Google and other cloud calendar providers fix their iPhone implementations before it becomes easy to sync the native iPhone calendar directly to their cloud calendars, for reasons explained previously here.

DAViCAL: Another open-source CalDAV server

A new open-source CalDAV server is making progress: DAViCAL now implements CalConnect's Freebusy Read URL. Written by New Zealander Andrew McMillan, DAViCAL "is a project...to create a straightforward CalDAV server for shared groupware calendaring. The project is written in PHP and uses a PostgreSQL database for backend storage."

Another opportunity for someone to write a cookbook to allow mere mortals to install and operate a low-cost CalDAV-compatible calendar-sharing server at home or elsewhere. Any takers? I may get around to running it and writing it myself.

VueMinder: Another route around Outlook calendaring?

What the Windows world needs is for a good, modern, interoperable and share-friendly calendar program to challenge Outlook successfully enough that emerging calendar-sync services support it. This will also provide a credible threat to Outlook since Outlook has no competition to speak of. Courtesy of Calendar Review, VueMinder is my latest candidate.

Bump: Watch it and weep

Calendar sharing used to be a lot easier when River and I both had Palm-based PDAs. We would beam events back and forth with abandon! Then we both left Palm behind and our own calendar swamp was born.

Now, for reasons I explain elsewhere, I am buying an iPhone. If you read my top 10 list of reasons, you won't see "calendar sharing" as one of them. Yes, Apple is improving the iPhone calendar, allowing users to initiate meeting requests from the phone itself. But seeing someone else's calendar still requires a third-party Web service, and if like us you want to keep a local copy of the calendar (not on Google Gears), you'll need Apple iCal or Microsoft Outlook on a Mac or PC respectively.

Here's the weepy part: for iPhone users, contact sharing is now as simple as the old Palm PDA beaming was, thanks to Bump Technologies:



Bump is free, so it will probably be ubiquitous on iPhones.

But the makers of Bump cannot add calendar sharing to the service because, unlike what is possible with iPhone contacts, Apple has not published the APIs to allow such sharing when it comes to calendars. Here's the official statement from David Lieb, co-founder and president of Bump Technologies, responding to an email from me:

"We'd love to support calendar event sharing with Bump, but, at least right now with OS 2.2.1, Apple doesn't give apps access to calendar events. We could create a web interface and hack our way around it, but we like to keep things simple and intuitive for our users. Perhaps things will change in future Apple OS releases. As we port Bump to other platforms, this is definitely something we'll want to support."

As I reported earlier here, the iPhone OS 3.0 -- which Bump and all developers are under NDA and cannot disclose details about -- does not include the calendar APIs. Which is a damn shame.

Maybe a groundswell of demand for calendar bumping will follow the widespread adoption of Bump for contact sharing.

May it be so!

Outlook now syncs to Google Apps

Apple and Google, Apple and Google...will Microsoft ever have another innovative calendar-sharing announcement to make?

Meanwhile, here's Google's latest: create events in Outlook and instantly sync them to Google Apps. (If you pay for Google Apps Premier or have a corporate license.)

iPhone will now generate meeting requests

According to Fast Company, the new iPhone, with a CalDAV-compliant calendar, can now create meeting requests.

Spanning Sync announces Spanning Tools for Mac

Today Spanning Sync, the Google Calendar/Apple iCal calendar (and contacts) sync tool, announced the public beta of Spanning Tools for Mac, "a suite of utilities that analyzes, reports, and fixes dozens of problems with iCal, Address Book, and Apple Sync Services — problems ranging from the obvious, such as duplicated calendar events, to the subtle, such as invalid calendar dates."

It's great to see such a utility, one which may be required at varous intersections between different makes of calendar.

Fedora to promote calendar sharing with Exchange

Dana Blankenhorn reports that Red Hat's Fedora 11 will support calendar sharing with Microsoft Exchange.

Tool to Meet

From Calendar Review: "I found a calendar website for making appointments in a new way. People do not need any accounts and passwords, and still it is completely private. See www.ToolToMeet.com."

Because it doesn't integrate with existing calendars, I wonder how useful this is. Probably it depends upon whether your calendar can detect meetings being proposed or scheduled inside your email. iCal for Mac does this, as does Zimbra.

Google Wave tips calendar sharing to the cloud

Some of you may already think shared calendaring is a cloud-only activity, but I submit that lots of folks still maintain their calendar on a PC or handheld device, and struggle (as I do) to try to share it with others. One reason this habit persists is just inertia; another is that the cloud calendars by and large do not really provide a great deal more function than the standalone ones. Cloud calendars such as Tungle start to change that by making it possible to "paint" one's availability on a grid of times, effortlessly shared with other Tungle users.

But Google Wave seems to me to add something really exciting to all software, that is the ability to "play back" the history of any online collaboration, and it would seem natural to me to have a shared calendar where I could do exactly that, following the steps that may have led up to a particular event being agreed upon by various participants. That's just one example of what something like Google Wave can provide. So I'm left believing that whether or not Google has invented a standard way to do this (as they hope) or not, all shared calendars will eventually have this capability, so that you would not only have the schedule, but a history of how the schedule came to be.

The Google Wave demo at I/O this week didn't specifically reference calendaring, but the very first use case was a dialogue between two users trying to agree to attend some event together, so I don't have to think very hard to come up with "waves" whose end product is a shared calendar entry.

The immediate impact on calendar sharing is negligible, but the long-term impact is profound. Maybe I've drunk too much Google Kool-Aid at this point, but any calendar sharing solution that ignores this kind of collaboration ultimately does so at its peril. And having Google do it first probably means it will end up getting done the same way across the Web, and that would be a good thing, whatever my reservations about Google's own privacy policies.

Google Calendar's Star Trek prank

I wouldn't be amused if Google Calendar had done this to my calendar.

Tasks now in Google Calendar

It took a year and three months to happen since I blogged about it, but Google Calendar finally added tasks. Yet another reason to insist on tasks as a standard feature in any online calendar, since at some point, someone's going to want to share it with a Google Calendar user.

4.9 hours per workweek

4.9 hours per workweek -- that's how much time business professionals spend to arrange, on average, seven meetings. MediaPost has the details about the study that found this. Seventeen percent of all meetings are rescheduled, which is one place where some services such as Tungle have some area for improvement, as detailed in my most recent podcast.

The study that produced these findings is sponsored by Swiss-based Doodle, a company started in 2007 as yet another would-be go-to place on the Web to arrange meetings.

Revolutionary calendaring

Dilbert creator Scott Adams: "I think the biggest software revolution of the future is that the calendar will be the organizing filter for most of the information flowing into your life."

Podcast #10: Tungle

On April 22 I had a phone conversation with Mark Gingras, founder & CEO of Tungle. Listen to Calendar Swamp podcast #10 (33:46, 54MB).

Podcast #9: TimeBridge

On April 3 I met with Yori Nelken, founder & CEO of TimeBridge, and John Stormer, TimeBridge vice president of marketing. Listen to Calendar Swamp podcast #9 (58:17, 54MB).

AirSet update

AirSet did a relaunch recently:



In my continuing quest for calendar-sharing nirvana, I visited AirSet and recorded CalendarSwamp podcast #8 (1:10:38, 66MB).

AirSet does more than share calendars now, branching out to share Web pages and documents. There's also a cool Firefox plug-in, the AirSet Connector, that lets AirSet users do the kind of smart cut-and-paste to a calendar that Microsoft demoed, but never delivered in a product.

More about smart cut-and-paste calendar options in my next podcast.

Tungle explained

Interesting new YouTube video from Tungle. I'll be speaking with them in the next week.

1,000 new iPhone APIs, but nothing for calendaring

Apple will publish 1,000 new APIs for the iPhone, but calendaring won't be one of them. Fabrizio Capobianco is outraged. I'll add my outrage. If Apple were to publish this API, we would get better calendaring options on the iPhone.

Inside the Facebook silo

Occasionally I peer into some new calendaring data silo. (There are so many!) Earlier this week, TechCrunch surveyed SocialCalendar and FriendEvent, calendaring apps inside of Facebook. If you and everyone you need to share with are never separated from Facebook, maybe these work for you? As for the rest of us, it looks like another data silo.

Welcome to NY Times readers

My "calendar users' bill of rights" premiered this morning in the New York Times online small business section. I've got more work to do on it, but thanks to David Strom, it's part of a larger conversation taking place on the Web.

The rise of calendar aggregators

Surely one piece of the puzzle called calendar sharing is aggregating many calendars into one. Jon Udell is working on one such calendar aggregator, his elmcity project, and one of his readers also brings a wiki-like aggregator, Calagator, to his attention. FuseCal and Upcoming also play in this area. Read Jon's post and comments on the post.

Funambol MobileWe

Funambol MobileWe
Originally uploaded by scottmace2005

This week Fabrizio Capobianco of Funambol gave me a demo of the Funambol alternative (bound to be superior, by the way) to MobileMe, first announced last year. This is intended to be made available by mobile phone operators (although some of what it provides, with a different front end, is also in beta testing over at AOL.com).

This is interesting work that brings multivendor calendar sharing into the cloud, and helps provide an alternative to Apple and Google. Although I'm not so sure I want to have my mobile phone operator at the center of my life, any more than I want Apple or Google there. At any rate, choice is good.

Here is a screen shot Funambol provided of the generic Funambol Portal. Imagine the Funamobol logo replaced by Verizon or Sprint and you get the idea.

Meridex responds to report of Calgoo Hub woes

Michael Lui, formerly of Calgoo and now with Meridex, sent me an email in response to my post earlier today about Calgoo Hub's problems. The email said in part:

"I want to assure you that during our transition to Meridex, none of the technical infrastructure was affected. The current downtime is a direct result of the unexpected extra traffic and attention we have been getting, and we are looking at expanding and adding servers to help the the load. However, as that was happening we ran into all sorts of technical issues related to expanding, such as replication and load balancing. Not a pretty situation ;-)

"Yes, our Calgoo Hub service is definitely going through a rough patch right now. We are not as prepared as we should have been, but we are confident that we will resolve it shortly."

So we'll see if Calgoo Hub returns to form. Meanwhile, I'm keeping my main calendar on Google Calendar, have installed Google Gears, and subscribed to the calendar from Sunbird to have a local copy of it that isn't dependent upon beta software such as the Gears/Gcal combo.

Changes at Calgoo, not for the better

Calgoo Software was sold last month to Meridex Software Corp. and the sale looks like it has taken its toll on Calgoo operations. River has been unable to connect to the Calgoo Hub service from Apple iCal for the past few days. I've got an inquiry into my former contact there; no response yet. For now, it may be time for me to move off of Calgoo...and probably also time to again try -- at least temporarily -- Google Calendar (and its new offline access).

Google Calendar offline gotcha

TechCrunch notes that offline access to Google Calendar is now generally available via Google Gears -- but that entries made online become read-only when offline. Fortunately, one can still add new calendar entries. But still, room for improvement!

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.

iPhone calendar sync without iTunes, or a Mac

Some time ago Calendar Swamp reader Jeff Widman asked if I had heard of Nuevasync. I hadn't, but I subscribed to the Nuevasync blog and began educating myself about this free service for syncing iPhone info, including the calendar, with Google Calendar and Google Contacts/Gmail. Now Widman has written a positive review of Nuevasync at TechCrunch IT, and I've started recommending it for those cases where someone has an iPhone but is running iTunes for Windows. I run iTunes for Windows, but only for music; I've always found its sync abilities lacking compared to iTunes for Mac and many other solutions. And this morning David Strom contacted me for a New York Times story he's writing on calendar interop for small businesses. For you iPhone-with-Windows folks out there, this is the deal.

For you Mac folks, I'd certainly recommend Nuevasync over MobileMe -- I can't believe Apple's still charging for it! Meanwhile, Nuevasync appears to have the jump on Spanning Sync and BusySync, because only Nuevasync takes the desktop Mac out of the equation in getting from the iPhone to Google and possibly other places in the future. +1 SwampDrain point for NuevaSync.

New year, new agenda

This year is already 20 days old, but since its start I've had a new agenda for this blog. The problems of calendars not working together are now well-documented, here and elsewhere. New calendars continue to appear and continue not to interoperate with other calendars. Interoperability continues to mean different things to different people:

• Can I read my calendar without being at my computer?*
• Can I read your calendar without being at your computer?
• Can I receive updates easily from other calendars, public and private?
  
• Can I update any such calendar remotely?
• Can I "sync" two calendars such that all changes made on one calendar are made on the other calendar, and that conflicts are resolved in a straightforward manner?
• Can I easily combine two calendars into one, or separate one calendar into two, and route them accordingly?
• If the calendar is maintained in the "cloud," do I have trust in that image of my calendar, such that the security and privacy of that information is assured?
  

This year, in 2009, I am dedicated to a systematic exploration of these questions. It's more than giving out SwampDrain points for jobs well or poorly done, though that may still happen from time to time.

Lastly, how can these questions be made part of a national dialogue about the productivity of America? It's all well and good to expand the use of broadband Internet communications to more parts of the country, but I remain convinced that providing a solid, interoperable calendaring infrastructure could raise our productivity more than any mere DSL, cable or WiMax hookup. Is anyone from the Obama administration listening?

* - "Computer" is any device where you enter your calendar info. That could be a phone, an iPod Touch, or some other calendar-enabled appliance.

BusyBlog bashes CalDAV...or somebody

The controversy about supposed shortcomings of CalDAV takes another twisty turn with this post from BusyBlog. Cmon Swampers...someone explain this to me. Is this read-only iPhone problem the fault of CalDAV, or Google, or Apple? Seems like using a solution like BusySync gets around the problem altogether. Does this suggest the need for a standard beyond CalDAV? Maybe it exists already, and I'm not paying enough attention?

Google Calendar adds CalDAV support

Google updated Google Calendar, adding CalDAV support. +1 SwampDrain point for Google.

I'm looking forward to the day when everyone who should supports CalDAV.

UPDATE: The Spanning Sync blog claims that calendars synced with CalDAV become read-only on the iPhone. Yikes!! I hope the problem is just the way Google Calendar implements CalDAV...and not a problem with CalDAV itself.

TimeDriver, HourTown: Any experiences out there?

Found on the Web: TimeTrade, which bills itself as "the world leader in customer self-service appointment scheduling" offers TimeDriver, which has been in public beta since August. It supports the usual calendar formats -- Outlook and Google Calendar -- but I haven't heard any unusual buzz about it. I think it competes with HourTown.

Has anyone reading this blog been on the receiving end of any appointments scheduled by either of these services?

Let a thousand Windows iCal-based calendars bloom

Here's another one: Desktop iCalendar Lite. Has anyone tried it?

CalConnect is coming to Redmond

I just noticed with interest that the next meeting of CalConnect will occur, for the first time, at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, February 2-6, 2009. I hope this means that all calendar-software engineers at Microsoft will be in attendance, taking notes and contributing to greater calendar interoperability.

Any Windows Live Hotmail stories out there?

Windows Live Hotmail now sports "a revamped calendar that makes it easier to share calendars with others, subscribe to multiple calendars and use your calendar with Microsoft Outlook."

Anyone out there using it? I'm curious to know if it goes beyond publish-and-subscribe and offers new sync services with other Microsoft calendars.

The customer service problem with calendaring

All the calendaring tech in the world won't make your life simpler if the company trying to communicate event or reservation changes to you doesn't have its act together.

More than Microsoft

Steve Ballmer (rhetorically) asks his customers:

"Why can't we create calendars that automatically merge our schedules at work and home?"

Steve, please make sure the answer isn't an all-Microsoft solution.

BidCal: Calendaring/eBay mashup

BidCal lets you monitor upcoming eBay auctions from within your calendar. It's from the makers of Calgoo.

I hope this isn't stressing Calgoo's calendar-sync server too much. Last night was the first time in months of use that we found it was down, at least for a few minutes.

eWeek puts calendar icon on cover, ignores calendaring

An ambitious eWeek October 13 cover story, "UC on the cheap," all about Unified Communications (a buzzword mainly at Microsoft), is the first trade pub in a while to feature a calendar icon on the cover. Unfortunately, the story itself focuses on VoIP and instant messaging, not calendaring. Bad enough calendar interoperability gets ignored by mobile phone vendors (the new Google Phone doesn't pretend to talk anything but Google Calendar); now an IT publication uses calendaring as part of sloganeering in an incomplete article.

Syncing two desktop calendars to Calgoo Hub

Those Calgoo folks are clever. They've included a way to sync more than one calendar with their Hub. They support Outlook and also their own free desktop calendar, named, not surprisingly, Calgoo Calendar.

Here's the cool part. I've already got a Calgoo Hub account. From their desktop calendar, I can browse the calendars in my Hub account and select which ones I want to sync to the desktop.

Why would I want to have the same desktop calendar in two places? Aside from the security that redundancy provides, there's another reason. The new Dell notebook I've just bought isn't powered on all day long. It tends to come out after hours when I'm chatting with River about upcoming events. So I'll have a Calgoo calendar on that notebook. But the other calendar will be on a desktop PC (yes, the same one that was running Sunbird) so if I need to add an event (or look one up) during the work day, I can quickly do that without having to wake up the Dell notebook. I just have to remember to sync to the Hub when I'm prepared to call it a work day.

Yes, I know it's more complicated than just storing one calendar up in the cloud and using Web access. But the way I see it, it's what this whole Microsoft "software+services" thing is all about. So far, it's working for me. (I'm sure that soon Microsoft will have it all figured out as well, if they don't already.)

But Microsoft remains the Windows-only solution. The Calgoo desktop Calendar is available not just for Windows, but for Mac OS X and Linux (Fedora Core 5 and Gentoo distributions) as well. I may have other observations about it after I've used it for a while. Ideally, I would like not to be locked into the Calgoo client, but for now, I'm glad to see it as a free Outlook alternative that does all I've asked of it.

UPDATE: I was able to sync a second set of events to the Hub, so while River still sees only the events she wants to, I can see an additional list of events that I want on my calendar, but since she doesn't subscribe to them, she doesn't see them. Just create a second calendar within Calgoo Calendar, sync it to the Hub, discover it with the second copy of Calgoo Calendar, and sync it from the Hub to that second desktop.

Buh-bye, Pocket PC

I'm kicking my Pocket PC to the curb. In its place I have a new Dell Inspiron 910, powered by the new Intel Atom chip. For sheer comfort I've ordered it with Windows XP, and then installed Mozilla Sunbird. I have the option to install BirdieSync if I wish to keep syncing this PC with the Pocket PC, but right now I'm content just to have the option. BirdieSync isn't available for Linux; that's the only reason why I didn't order the Inspiron 910 with Linux. (BirdieSync requires Microsoft's ActiveSync, and you can bet Microsoft won't be porting ActiveSync to Linux any time soon. I never liked ActiveSync anyway.)

Moving my Sunbird calendar data from another PC to the Inspiron 910 was a bit tricky. After hunting around I identified the file where Sunbird stores the calendar. It's got the non-intuitive name of storage.sdb. I copied it onto a jump drive and then replaced the new storage.sdb on the Inspiron 910 with the one from my PC. Viola, my calendar is there and it even knows the Calgoo URL where it should publish. All I have to do is enter my Calgoo name and password.

Next up: Installing a CalDAV server on that old Windows PC. Part of the next phase: Giving River a secure place to publish her calendar on our LAN.

Yahoo! Calendar supports CalDAV

Yahoo! updated its calendar, adding CalDAV support, and is hosting CalConnect XIII this week in Santa Clara. +1 SwampDrain point for Yahoo!