It’s hard to beat a pocket diary: there’s still no more practical way of keeping track of where you or your kids should be, and when. But last week’s launch of Google Calendar could encourage more people to explore the possibilities of putting their schedules online.
Google had long been expected to add a calendar to its growing portal — everyone else has one — but it’s also a growth area. The past year has seen the arrival of more than a dozen calendar sites, with the most visible being 30Boxes, Airset, Kiko and SpongeCell. If the online calendar market is about to take off, Google Calendar should be ready.
There are, of course, advantages to going online. First, you can share your schedule with other people; for example, you can have separate shared calendars for family members, fellow workers or members of a club. Second, you can subscribe to lists of events, which means you can add, say, concert dates or your favourite sports teams matches without typing them all in. Third, you can’t easily misplace an online calendar — and anybody who has lost a Filofax will appreciate how devastating that can be.
So far, these features have not proved attractive to the average web user. According to research firm Nielsen/NetRatings, AOL has the most popular online calendar, with 2,9-million users, followed by Yahoo! (2,4-million) and Microsoft’s MSN (1,3-million). Since MSN’s Hotmail has around 200-million users, and all of them have access to its online calendar, the take-up is less than 1%.
More responsive
But all of those services date back to the 1990s: Google Calendar is faster and easier to use. Like Gmail, Google’s e-mail service, Google Calendar downloads and runs JavaScript code in the browser (Internet Explorer and Firefox only), which makes the user interface much more responsive. Google has also exploited the iCalendar internet standard, which has superseded the old vCal, and XML, the eXtensible Markup Language. The first makes it much easier to share calendar data; XML makes it easy to add a button to a web page, which users can click to add an event to their Google Calendar.
Google has such a huge influence on the web that these features are likely to be well supported, and there are already lots of calendars you can search for and import. Thousands of web jockeys are already building sites that use Google Maps, and its a fair bet that many will use the programming features of Google Calendar, too. A calendar entry can already send out e-mail invitations and — in the United States only, at the moment — SMS messages. Perhaps it could be used to trigger other events, leading to a more calendar-driven world.
Google has also included some natural language recognition in Gcal’s Quick Add box, so you can type a sentence — ”Meet Pat at Heathrow next Wednesday at 11am” — to create an appointment. This has been done before by, for example, the 30Boxes calendar, and Spongecell seems to do it better. Still, it will be new to most Google Calendar users, and it’s handier than filling in a form to create an appointment.
Another idea is to parse e-mail messages in Gmail and use the details of meetings to create calendar entries. Google Calendar does this, but not for everyone. It’s a feature that is still being rolled out, and my Gmail mailbox has no calendar integration at all.
Google will also face competition. Both Yahoo! and Microsoft have similar offerings in beta test at the moment, and Microsoft is expected to include a calendar in the Vista version of Windows that will connect to the calendar on its Windows Live website. However, at the moment, Google Calendar is much the most polished offering.
But Google Calendar is also a beta with a long way to go. It does not have the synchronisation features needed for serious business use — an area where Yahoo! leads, through its use of Puma’s Intellisync. Google Calendar seems to have a gaping hole where the open industry standard SyncML (Synchronisation Markup Language) could be.
Serious calendar users normally keep their schedule in Microsoft Outlook or another PIM (personal information manager) such as Ecco. This desktop schedule is then synchronised with one or more mobile devices: usually a phone or a PDA (personal digital assistant), such as a Palm or Psion, or even a music player — whatever you carry around. It could also be synchronised with an online service, but rarely is.
Unfinished synchrony
At the moment, Google Calendar lets you upload an existing calendar from Outlook or anything that supports the iCalendar standard, such as Apple’s iCal and Mozilla Sunbird, and you can download a Google Calendar and read it. With a bit of work, you can even update one from the other, essentially by subscribing to a ”feed”. What you cannot do is have your desktop calendar synchronise with a Google Calendar so that one updates the other, the way Outlook synchronises with a mobile phone. According to reports, that feature is on the way.
And with SyncML — which competes with Microsoft’s ActiveSync — it should be possible to synchronise a Google Calendar directly with a compatible Motorola, Nokia, Sony Ericsson or Symbian-based cellphone.
However it’s done, syncing with a portable device is probably the key to making an online calendar really useful — and perhaps finally replacing some of those pocket diaries. – Guardian Unlimited Â