Google Calendar Coming Soon? 313
mcpastore writes "Blogs have recently been buzzing over the possibility of seeing a Google Calendar popping up soon. Dave bases his prediction on the fact that one of his sites has been getting a tremendous amount of hits from GoogleBot ever since he added the iCal calendar. It makes perfect sense Google would try to go after the calendar market as it is their last big missing piece of the portal puzzle."
Doesn't add up to anything (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Doesn't add up to anything (Score:4, Insightful)
I prefer to go crazy over the products *after* Google has released them. Mmmmm, google maps... *drools*
What about the weather? (Score:5, Interesting)
It won't even automatically bring up the weather for your area in less than 1 click. Google seems to be well positioned to corner this market as well.
Re:What about the weather? (Score:3, Informative)
Then try this [noaa.gov]. Assuming you're in the US, it's got good data. Sure, not as feature-rich as weather channel's site, but has the info you need.
Re:What about the weather? (Score:4, Funny)
It is a cold, dreary, Midwest morning. I'm driving to a client site through refrozen snow slush. I realize that my thermostat is set way too low and numbly turn it up to 80F. Suddenly, my car navigation system starts giving me strange directions, which of course, I obey. Ten hours later I realize I'm in Florida.
Re:What about the weather? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What about the weather? (Score:5, Informative)
The Weather Channel has never had a useful web site. It has always been an epitome of anything which can be annoying, insipid, and featureless, consisting of little but regurgitated and labotomized government weather data and the occasional and blatant attempt to extort money from users. (At one time, they wanted paid for the singular effort of delivering storm alerts to my pager. By e-mail. Absurd.)
Back In The Day, before the rest of the world had heard much about this whole InterWeb thing, the University of Michigan started giving away weather information online. It seemed to grew in the altruistic sort of way that many things seemed to back then, steadily aquiring new features and formats for no apparant reason except that it was possible to do so.
That started 15 years ago [google.com].
Today, following the general trend, the efforts are commercialized (read: the staff needed to eat and pay rent), but quite clearly live on at The Weather Underground [wunderground.com].
Sure, there's ads. But there's a wealth of good information, a feeling of completeness, and a general lack of bullshit and dumbness which is so sorely lacking with things like weather.com. A subscription to toss the ads and enable a couple of different features is a miniscule $5/year, which I've been happily paying for the last several years.
The information there is continuously improving. For example, they've been putting a lot of effort into their detailed radar presentations over the past year, which has really made a difference in seeing what's about to go on outside.
I like Google and the effort they put into user interfaces, simplicity, and completeness (except for when they most recently fucked up groups.google.com), but given the efforts of wunderground, I really don't care if Google ever gets into the weather business.
[ObDisclaimer: I didn't attend UMich, I don't even think I know anyone who has, and I definately have no interest in boosting wunderground traffic except, perhaps, to help people stay informed.]
I use the Weather Channel every day (Score:3, Interesting)
And I wouldn't exactly say that weather.com is "useless". I can visit the site and it tells me what the forecast for taday, tonight, and tomorrow is. For me, that is typically enough. (And a weekend or 10-day forecast is one-click away too.)
Of course, if I am feeling frisky and want to look at nifty Java apps for radar data, I'll visit IntelliCast [intellicast.com] or some other site.
Again, for me, seeing the weather for today and tomorrow in my status bar is all the functionality
Re:Doesn't add up to anything (Score:2)
It's called Orkut [orkut.com], and it sucks.
Re:Doesn't add up to anything (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Doesn't add up to anything (Score:3, Funny)
Well, the writeup does say it was "blogs" referring to this. It's obviously not even worth considering.
Re:Doesn't add up to anything (Score:3, Informative)
Sync with mine when the computer clocks aren't even on the same day? I don't think so. And don't tell me it's just a matter of checking...
As an example, Palm tried this and failed. For good reason.
It's about time (Score:5, Funny)
Too much Google? (Score:2, Interesting)
Greetings (Score:3, Funny)
I recently discovered your post criticizing Google on Slashdot, and I am here to help you. You are now banned from the internet. Thank you for your past usage, and we hope to welcome you back in the future when you've accepted Google into your life.
Re:Too much Google? (Score:2)
but go ahead and tell us how not every problem can be fixed by a govt program or a commercial product.
Re:Too much Google? (Score:5, Funny)
Too Much Google? When I googled google on the state of the google in google, I found that google is googling googlers about the emergence of google as a new paradigm in google's google of googles. This googles google on the google of google, by google. for google, with googles googling googles googled.
Re:Too much Google? (Score:3, Funny)
Say smurf and I'll smack you.
Re:Too much Google? (Score:2)
Re:Too much Google? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Too much Google? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Too much Google? (Score:5, Insightful)
By providing people with free tools that they can choose not to use if they don't want them?
That doesn't really fit with any definition of "control" that I'm familiar with.
Re:Too much Google? (Score:2)
You mean like MS provides IE?
/devil's advocate :-)
Re:Too much Google? (Score:2, Interesting)
Calendar doesn't surprise me a bit, nor will a follow-up that blends them tightly with an offering for (also common) small-business internal messaging packages.
Google's whole thing has been to take supposedly "tired" technologies and, oh god, "embrace and extend" them. So long as they keep doing it better (and without Microsoft's evilness), that's ok.
Re:Too much Google? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Too much Google? (Score:2)
Wouldn't it be great if... (Score:2, Interesting)
Ads (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ads (Score:3, Funny)
Sort of... I think you accidently left a "might" in there. And I'm not sure about the "gift-related" part either.
I don't buy it (Score:5, Insightful)
Second the whole calendar thing has been kind of done to death already. Outlook does a pretty decent job on the PC and iCal does an amazing job on the mac. When Google moved into email they did so because the current web based emails sucked, there was major room for imporvement. There really ins't much else you can do with the calendar.
In the end it really just doesn't make sense.
Re:I don't buy it (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the main benefits of their apps is that they are accessible from anywhere...only a modest improvement is needed to make people switch and they are clearly trying to innovate.
Re:I don't buy it (Score:5, Insightful)
If Google did produce a web based calendar service, it would augment the capabilites of iCal on the Mac not replace it. As far as I am aware iCal lets you upload your calendars to the web, and view them online but I don't think you can change them online. If Google Calendar existed then you could update your calendar using just a web browser, and then keep it up to date on your desktop using an iCal remote subscription.
The whole iCal file format is very cool, and no where used to its full potential. Sunbird uses it too.
Web based (Score:2)
In fact, I already have my own little webmail page on my little server (and tons more features), but I'd really like it if there was some easy (open source?) calendaring web app like that to complement the setup (not that I really searched hard, and making a basic one would be pretty trivial...)
Re:I don't buy it (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I don't buy it (Score:2)
however.. i think this guys reasoning is bogus, just because he gets more hits from googlebot doesn't mean zilch. but a calendar add-on to gmail would fit in very well.
seriously though, google has no long term strategy. if you look at them as whole you'd see it. they're just another company now looking for a buck, do evil or not.
Re:I don't buy it (Score:3, Informative)
There IS a web based version of Outlook. It requres your site to run IIS on their mail server. It uses the same username/password as the mail server uses for outlook.
I buy it. (Score:5, Interesting)
"Going to Movies" - Pimp some movies.
"Tax due" - Pimp some tax services.
"Pay off credit card" - Pimp a credit card
"Johns Birthday" - Pimp some gift ideas
Just like gmail and adsense, calendar advertising could be used to help supply adverts targeted to something that someone is specifically interested in. Calendars might even be better than email as they will probably be more focused and less noisy than email conversations.
Re:I buy it. (Score:2)
Re:I don't buy it (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple does this with
There is the little problem of how to make it pay for itself, but google seems to be very creative about how to use this sort of information for marketing purposes, and if they allowed people to link in commercial calendars (for example your favorite TV programs new shows, or the local rock climbing club, etc...) I could see this being a very viable advertising targeting tool.
Re:I don't buy it (Score:5, Insightful)
If their calendar works as well as iCal, but brings it to the rest of the planet, that would be a complete coup.
I hope you're trolling. Sure, I don't see that it's the most groundbreaking thing Google will ever do, but you're crazy if you don't think they have a team or three working on calendar solutions. They have a lot of people.
Re:I don't buy it (Score:4, Informative)
The real killer app here is one that fixes all of the synchronization issues between these disparate formats (say, with SyncML) and then uses some sort of social networking system (like tribe or myspace) to tie it all together.
Companies had a first shot at this (WHEN.COM for example) but blew it because they went after profits instead of real innovation (or in when's case, got bought out by AOL.)
Re:I don't buy it (Score:3, Informative)
Are you kidding? Sure, it seems like Outlook-bashing is a fun thing to do, but lets be honest here. Perhaps the *only* reason outlook/exchange is entrenched in corporate IT is because of their superior calendaring.
Have you heard of Outlook Web Access? Sure, you need IE to get the most out of it, but barring that requirement, it's the single best web calendar I've seen to date.
Calendar integration is time based searching (Score:5, Insightful)
There's heaps that Google could do with calendars.
For some time now I have been thinking how cool it would be to integrate text, spatial and temporal searching. For example, "tell me when any of my favourite musicians will be performing within a 2 hour drive of my current location" or "I will be visiting these cities on these dates, tell me about these sorts of events occuring while I am there". Google is rapidly building up enough data to let people add time and space dimensions to their searches.
Xix.
Re:I don't buy it (Score:3, Interesting)
There may not be much more that you can do with a calendar, but there are plenty of us out here who'd like a lot more. A calendar which indexed all events in an area and made them available for searches like
"On Wednesday night I want a Korean barbecue meal at starting at 7:30, followed by [name of movie], then live funk music until 1am, then tapas bar for an hour or two, then karaoke till dawn and catch a train home when everyone else is going
Google on the brain (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Google on the brain (Score:4, Funny)
With the general education level of the folks that work at Google, I'm guessing they have like 8000 man years experience in Ramen. Google Brand Instant Ramen(R) would own the market once they get it to that $0.10/package price point most college students base their food budget on.
Re:Google on the brain (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Google on the brain (Score:5, Funny)
I would just _love_ to be able to purchase Google shirts...
Shirt with a "Search" button printed in front, and a pair of pants with the "I feel lucky" one.
Marketing opportunity here...
A Reflection (Score:2, Interesting)
The good thing is that as good as added tons of new stuff over years the front page has not been jammed full of adds and paid links.
Interesting, but... why? (Score:3, Funny)
I mean, say I load it up and search for "March 3, 2005". I'll probably get a couple of obscure religious and national holidays, then a few zillion pages of entries like "Math class @ 10:00 AM" and "Meeting with union 3-4PM" and "Don't forget the recycling bin!"
Well, that was useful. Nice to know how many people with calendaring software have math classes this morning; I'd never have found it if it weren't for you, Google!
Re:Interesting, but... why? (Score:3, Interesting)
Could be useful (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Could be useful (Score:2)
gCal? hold on, that name is so formulaic is might already exist...
BINGO!: "Gcal [gnu.org] is a program for calculating and printing calendar" from none other than GNU!
I was hoping it would be a GNOME/GTK Calendar, but whatever...
Re:Could be useful (Score:2)
Evolution [gnome.org] has a nice calendar interface, and the API [gnome.org] is pretty good, too.
I'm working on a Ruby binding [rubyforge.org] for it and it's straightforward as long as you're familiar with the Gnome coding conventions.
I'd pay for this (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd be willing to pay money for that.
Re:I'd pay for this (Score:2, Informative)
Adding a calendar (and maybe tasks) to Gmail would put it over the top as a replacement service alternative to in-house exchange servers. However, the service would also need to:
- sync with a PDA
- export groups of messages to a common format for archiving (I could fill a gigabyte of mail in three months at work)
- allow some sort of calendar sharing based on personal and group-set permissions -- so I would kno
Hopeful, but pessimistic... (Score:2, Interesting)
And yeah, I'd love it if all meshed seamlessly into SunBird [mozilla.org], Gmail, and iCal.
Re:Hopeful, but pessimistic... (Score:2)
Re:Hopeful, but pessimistic... (Score:2)
What browser and platform did you use? (I'm betting IE on Windows)
Probably not a calendar (Score:5, Insightful)
Makes much more sense for them to add the time element to searches, not a calendar function similar to Outlook or Lotus Notes.
Er, no, not really (Score:5, Informative)
While Google may or may not be working on a calendar, his "evidence" is lacking. Basically, he's saying that Google is walking his calendar a lot, and using that as evidence that Google is building itself a calendar. There's a much simpler explanation: Google goes nuts when it runs into PHP iCalendar [sourceforge.net]. It sees every link as a new page to look at, and after a few runs by googlebot, it's trying to index the daily calendar page for every day within a decade of today. I've been dealing with this today, adding robots.txt entries to keep it away from PHP iCalendar, because Googlebot is generating thousands of hits per day on my little site.
So, just because Googlebot and PHP iCalendar don't get along, that doesn't mean that Google is busy building up a monster searchable calendar.
Having said that, I'd love to see a gmail calendar component that you could access via WebDAV. I don't see how they'd make money on it, though.
fucking blogs... (Score:3, Interesting)
This is getting almost as bad as Mac Rumors!
Why is it that we never hear about rumors that prove to be false?
(back to my hole I call a server-room)
Google community - Mac Community (Score:5, Interesting)
If there is even the slightest whiff of a new feature, the Internet explodes with every forum discussing the possibilities of "what could be."
I don't have a point, I just found it interesting
Re:Google community - Mac Community (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm pretty sure there's a couple of guys over at Google that also routinely read the forums and then come up with "Hey... They're on to something here, how can we implement this...".
What if most new Google features are not innovation but a reaction to those "rumors" ?
Based on a shaky premise (Score:5, Informative)
I wrote a PHP calendar page three years ago and it had so many hits from recursive links that I had to put an entry in the 'robots.txt' file to stop it. Looking at my logs, it had scanned every month for about 20 years in the past and 20 years in the future.
Re:Based on a shaky premise (Score:2)
Just speculation, of course....
Robots.txt and Google (Score:5, Informative)
If both Google and MSN did it, it makes me wonder if this guy is a little trigger happy with his predictions. We didn't really even have any content in the calender area so I can't figure out why they would keep crawling all these empty pages.
Who Knows? - G
Calendar is the last slot in an enterprise package (Score:5, Insightful)
If Google has calendaring and mail, with interfaces that are both simple and intuitive (obviously a strength of Google) then they can bundle that with their Enterprise search functionality and have a heck of a package.
They can sell it service-based like Microsoft dreams about, or they can ship it out on the little yellow boxes. Users are freed from installation hassles, and in the subscription package, IT departments from management hassles.
It seems like the next logical step to me.
-Zipwow
The Natural Language Link (Score:3, Informative)
I know I already want it.
-Zipwow
Re:Calendar is the last slot in an enterprise pack (Score:2)
Re:Calendar is the last slot in an enterprise pack (Score:3, Informative)
Calendar must sync to swim (Score:3, Insightful)
Two things... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is simply not true. There are an unlimited number of things they could implement. IMHO, perhaps the biggest "missing piece" is an IRC search, of which they were rumored to be creating, but then the buzz died off. However with the success of sites like isoHunt and Packetnews (even with all its friggen ads) Google is missing out on probably a quarter of the searches I do while online.
Second, it's a wellknown fact that the more often your website is updated, the more often that Google checks it. If he recently added a CMS, blog, or iCal, then it is likely Google is just coming back because he's updating a whole lot more.
Site calendar = spider trap? (Score:2)
Or am I incorrect in my understanding of what a spider trap is?
But... (Score:2)
Another calendar...grrr... (Score:3, Insightful)
(Current problem: Syncing calendars in Lotus Notes and Niku Clarity or Openworkbench. An iCal extention is available for Notes ($900 for 75 licences), but AFAICT none for Clarity or Openworkbench.)
Coming soon... (Score:3, Funny)
WTF (Score:4, Insightful)
Why is that? Can't Google just install its own iCal and test it out?! Besides, even if it wants to see how many people are using Calendars on their websites, isn't indexing them once is enough?!
Lotus Notes or Outlook (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh, the possibilities! (Score:5, Funny)
I can't wait.
Lamity (Score:3, Insightful)
Wouldn't it be cool if blogging crashed like the dot-com boom? Just think:
what's next? (Score:2)
And you know what the saddest thing is? I would use it! happily! Gotta have respect for a company that sets a goal at e-billion dollars: http://battellemedia.com/archives/000630.php/ [battellemedia.com]
Anyday.com was the best (Score:2)
I've noticed similar (Score:3, Interesting)
I was quite surprised at how quickly googlebot started looking at it - a lot more than other pages, and without many links at all. Whether it's related to a hypothetical gCalendar I don't know - perhaps they just know that calendars might update regularly?
Yay for criminals! (Score:3, Funny)
Err....
Mozilla Calendar with WebDAV - HOWTO (Score:4, Informative)
Next, configure Apache 2 to use WebDAV to access the calendar from anywhere. Uncomment these lines in httpd.conf:
[IfModule mod_dav_fs.c]
DAVLockDB
[/IfModule]
Make sure
Add the following lines to httpd.conf:
[Directory "/www/mydomain/ical/"]
DAV On
[/Directory]
In Calendar, create a new calendar file, and point the Remote Server URL to:
http://mydomain.com/ical/foo.ics
Replace mydomain, the path, and the calendar file name with your
values. Check the "Automatically publish your changes..." checkbox.
Now you can access your calendar from anywhere.
I'll pin my hopes on sunbird (Score:3, Insightful)
Google... the only calendar I can see them keeping is a public events calendar, who wants to put in 'Appointment with dentist' and have an advert pop up next to it 'Low cost dental insurance'
Here's what Google will do (Score:4, Interesting)
Google will build in an additional level of links, with added intelligence, on top of normal web pages. Say you're browsing a conference web site, an the programme says: "11:00-12:00: Mr X - An analysis of Karma Whoring". The google toolbar will figure out the correct date, time and subject, and allow you to click on this "virtual" link and have it added to your calendar - even (and this is the kicker) if the web site wasn't designed for this - google will figure it out. As far a I understand this idea has been patented and the patent was bought by google.
Feel free to shoot me down as an anonymous liar karma whore, but we'll see who's right!
(yes I know ACs don't get karma)..
Google's been hitting a section of my site too! (Score:3, Funny)
[ Disclaimer: No. Just... No. You sicko. Jeez. How2ReadAJoke ]
Re:speaking of portals... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:speaking of portals... (Score:3, Insightful)
About the only product Google has that doesn't benefit from registration (but should) is Google News BETA. I would use it a lot more often if I could customize the types of stories I want to see more or l
Re:speaking of portals... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:speaking of portals... (Score:2)
Heck, you could even integrate google, yahoo, and the evil empire if that floats your boat.
You could even email it to your gmail account, and have it accessable anywhere you have a net connection.
Re:speaking of portals... (Score:2)
Re:Why so little publicity? (Score:2)
Re:I must admit... (Score:2)
Re:I must admit... (Score:2)
I'd install it, but I have another user of my machine, who I don't want to have the ability to index *my* documents.
Re:Google! (Score:2)
Here's a free calendar program [google.com] you may want to check out.
Re:Google productivity/organization package? (Score:2)
Actually I hate to admit it, but it really does do a lot of those things you mentioned if you use Outlook with it...it would actually be nice if there was a little more quality competition out there for this kind of thing...
Re:Google productivity/organization package? (Score:2)
I'm sure a lot of companies would kill for one of those. Add to those services a proper api so you could integrate the rest of your applications with it and I think they would sell like hot cakes.