Google Calendar Coming Soon?

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

A google calendar would be nice but I don't know if this guys predictions amounts to anything more then just hearsay. I run a couple of websites and the stat bump that he is basing a lot of his predictions on is probably just because he got a bump in his overall pagerank or perhapse google did a deeper index. The way they work when they index you is they do a initial surface sweep and then come back a few weeks later and hit you for a lot more.

Re:Doesn't add up to anything

Yeah, this sounds just about as trustworthy as all those predictions that Google would soon be offering VOIP. Remember that? We're still waiting...

I prefer to go crazy over the products *after* Google has released them. Mmmmm, google maps... *drools*

What about the weather?

I would love to see Google go after the weather market. Weather Channel's site is terrible and hasn't changed 5 years.
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?

Google doing weather the Google way? I can see it now...

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. ...I could live with that.

Re:What about the weather?

To me, weather info is the kind of thing I like to have around all the time, so I use the WeatherFox Firefox extension.

Re:What about the weather?

Not to sound like spam, but:

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.]

Re:Doesn't add up to anything

Could be a coincidence, but I just noiticed today that Googlebot has been hammering the calendar section of a site I run, but not the rest of the site.

It's about time

I hear Google plans to add a day to the weekend, and add two months to the year. It's about time someone with a plan rewrote the calendar.

Re:Too much Google?

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?

It seems like Google is trying to control every aspect of the internet/computer.

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.

Ads

So when your, or someone else's birthday's coming, you might see more gift-related ads?

I don't buy it

A calendar seems pretty clearly not to be in google's long term strategy. Everything they do they do because they can using their searching technology to make the way things are done even better. Be it email with searches, almost all the projects in google labs, etc. Search functions don't really fit all that well into a calendar, at least nothing that is goign to be improved by their algorithms.

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

I disagree with the idea that there's not much more to be done with calendars. If they could just port over that scrolling effect of maps to multiple calendar day views I'd use it...they can even keep it beta forever, I don't mind.

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

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.

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.

Re:I don't buy it

I don't know if I buy the whole "there really isn't much else you can do with the calendar" thing. Looking back on what google has done for searching and web based e-mail it seems so OBVIOUS there was major room to improve, but no one had done it. These guys see things in a different way and make improvements that no one else saw before them. Sure, nothing you can imagine can be added to a calendar, but I'm not so sure that they can't think something up.

I buy it.

I'm sure search can be applied to calendar entries.

"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 don't buy it

I think there is some real room for Google to offer a new service, or rather to provide a high-profile better-interfaced offering just like they did with gmail. Namely I could see them offering WebDAV-based iCal (the format) hosting with a web interface. That way people using Apple's iCal and Mozilla's calendaring applications would have a place to publish their calendars to...

Apple does this with .Mac, so there is precedent, but there is a lot of room for improvements. And google can be a lot higher profile than .Mac. And with iCal rumored to have bi-directional syncing in 10.4 and Sunbird's ability to do some of that, the time is just about ripe for this type of service.

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

Are you kidding? Outlook does a poor job on the PC, and iCal does a passing job on the Mac, but neither of them sync with each other and neither of them are web based. Hell, you should be able to syndicate a calendar with RSS feeds.

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

You should.

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.)

Calendar integration is time based searching

Everything they do they do because they can using their searching technology to make the way things are done even better.

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.

Google on the brain

I love Google as much as the next person; I use it almost exclusively to search for pages. However, it seems to me some fanboys won't be happy until we're eating Google brand noodles out of Googlebrand dishware wearing Google brand clothing and then we buy Google brand detergent to get the Googdles stain off of my new Google shirt.

Re:Google on the brain

some fanboys won't be happy until we're eating Google brand noodles

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

If they were smart, they'd make Google beer at $.10 a can so college students can afford food.

Re:Google on the brain

I love Google as much as the next person; I use it almost exclusively to search for pages. However, it seems to me some fanboys won't be happy until we're eating Google brand noodles out of Googlebrand dishware wearing Google brand clothing and then we buy Google brand detergent to get the Googdles stain off of my new Google shirt.

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...

Interesting, but... why?

Assuming Google is developing a kind of search tool to index and organize all the public internet calendars in the world, who would want to use it?

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!

Could be useful

It'd be nice if they really integrated it into gmail. Yahoo already has such a feature [yahoo.com], and it's not horrible, but I'm sure gCal could be much better.

I'd pay for this

I use gmail via the webclient all the time now, and I really want a calendar to be integrated with it so I can access all my important times/dates/todos in one place anywhere I am, not just at home. My Corp has outlook webmail but I HATE HATE HATE the user interface. Gmail has probably the best interface I've ever used, and if they added a calendar to that...

I'd be willing to pay money for that.

Probably not a calendar

My guess is they want to search events. It would be cool to google "concerts in denver" at calendar.google.com and get something meaningful back. It's all about searching, and storing your events in google doesn't really accomplish anything.

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

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...

Come on, just because one guy noticed some GoogleBot activity on his site doesn't tell us squat about Google's future plans.

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

Anyone notice how people follow Google now like die-hard mac heads follow Apple?

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

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'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

Calendar web pages are a tricky problem for search engines because they usually have links in them to navigate forward/back a month or to view a particular day in more detail. Navigating in this way can look like a lot of different pages if the parameters are passed in a URL because the pages are dynamically generated ad-infinitum. The poor search engine will recursively rip through each month of the year until some subroutine in the search engine decides that the page has had enough and then it will do it all over again the next time it indexes the site.

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.

Robots.txt and Google

We run a college LUG web site ( here [uvlug.org] ) and noticed that both Google and MSN had bots that appeared to be "stuck" in the calender (iCal) section of our site. We added entries to our robots.txt to keep them out of there. That cut down on server traffic almost instantly and what appeared to be regular crawling resumed.

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

I've been saying this for weeks now. Actually, ever since the first time I said, "Wow, I love g-mail, I wish I could use it for work."

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

Calendar must sync to swim

GoogleCal, Sunbird or any other calendar must syncronize with PDAs, cellphones, iPods, ... to be more than yet another groupware programming exercise. Would not going below the desktop be new ambitiously new territory for Google? The time to enter that wild territory is ripe.

Two things...

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.

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.

Another calendar...grrr...

I'd like to see the vendors PICK ONE PROTOCOL/FORMAT and USE IT. So far, iCal has the best coverage, though it's not universal and can have problems between implementations.

(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...

...the Google CLOCK! WAY better than a standard clock. Skinnable hands and face, choose analog or digital interface, tells the time anywhere in the world (even where you are). Integrates smoothly into your Google calendar and toolbar.

WTF

"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."

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?!

Oh, the possibilities!

Imagine the targeted links they'll put on calendar entries for your mother's birthday [1800flowers.com], your quarterly performance review [speedstick.com] and a blind date [trojancondoms.com]...

I can't wait.

Lamity

Since when is a handful of bloggers saying "Wouldn't it be cool if..." news?

Wouldn't it be cool if blogging crashed like the dot-com boom? Just think:

• we'd be free of such english language monstrosities as "blogosphere"
  
• 15 year old nerds would be far more productive
  
• we wouldn't have to read the same tired, uninformed navel gazing presented as valuable contributions to human knowledge
  

I've noticed similar

About a week ago I put up a new link to a random timetabling iCal outputting python script.

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!

It's about time someome did this so the whole world can see when I'm out of town and my stuff is just sitting around waiting to be stolen ;)

Err....

Mozilla Calendar with WebDAV - HOWTO

First, download Mozilla Calendar [mozilla.org]

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 /var/lib/dav/lockdb
[/IfModule]

Make sure /var/lib/dav and /var/lib/dav/lockdb exist and have read/write by the Apache user.

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

With a lot more development, it could turn into a decent program, having it work out of the box and intergrate with all the commercial systems out there would be a killer feature for it though.

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

I post this anonymously, even though I'm under no NDA with anyone, however I'm close to some sources, and here's what will happen:

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!

I've noticed a huge increase in GoogleBot hits to my underage beastial gay midget porn section of my site. This leads me to believe that Google will soon be offering underage beastial gay midget porn. They'll probably call it Goopsyourarrested.com or something.

[ Disclaimer: No. Just... No. You sicko. Jeez. How2ReadAJoke ]