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?