Gmail Incorporates Google Calendar

So, Google has started to incorporate Calendar elements into Gmail. The obvious Outlook-ish invitations work:

I love Google calendar, and have switched over, perhaps for ever. The integration with Google Maps is a killer, and the invitation system is boss:

I couldn't get the supposed "auto recognition" of events to work reliably, although Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped makes it seem easy, unless I specifically used the phrase "can you join me for lunch Friday at 12pm" or the like. Invitations like "can you get on a telcon at 2pm Fri" didn't work. For the moment, that is in beta, for real.

Note over on the left side, I have partitioned my world into a bunch of different calendars, which have different kinds of visibility. I make the Family calendar accessible to my family, but private to anyone else. I will be making the Conferences calendar public, so that anyone can see where I am -- although I think I will rename to something like Stowe's Whereabouts. My pal Greg gave me access to his calendar, and I will be doing that for him, since we work together a lot and basically have no secrets. Work, Work, Work is all the scheduled work stuff, like the endless telcons and meetings. My partitioning, though, I can click various things on and off independently. I would rather have tags, though, so that events could appear in multiple calendars.

So now my desktop calendar, iCalendar, is just a repository with subscriptions to the various calendars at Google. It have set it up to sync every hour, so when I am disconnected from the web I have a working copy. In this way, this model of calendaring is more like blogging than ever. I publish my calendar on the web (perhaps with protections), and I and others subscribe using a calendar feed reader -- in this case iCalendar. And of course, iSync syncs the local copy at iCalendar to my phone (which Google doesn't do, yet), which is just like putting a podcast onto my iPod from the RSS feed reader.

tags: gmail, google+calendar, auto+recognition, icalendar, isync, philipp+lenssen

Comments

[rick gregory]

I'd be careful before you rely on GC if you use it to invite people to meetings. People with Apple Mail just get a .ics attachment to a pretty barebones email message and folks with Outlook see the raw text file, not a message with Accept/Decline options.

[Stowe Boyd]

Hmmm. I will have to try that out, and rag Google about it.

[rick gregory]

Please do... I wsa going to do a review, but given that it would be literally my first post...

A bit more info - Apple Mail is the Panther version and looks like this. Which is a ton better than how it shows in Outlook. Meanwhile, 30Boxes gets it right.

[Mark Scrimshire]

I am sure you know about the SMS interface to Google Calendar that can keep you in touch when there is no wifi around. ( http://ekive.blogspot.com/2006/05/update-google-calendar-on-road.html) for the basic info on the SMS interface. Try sending a gCal Quick Add syntax SMS message to 48368. Eg. "Meet Mark at Café Montmartre tomorrow at 1pm"

Since the gCal-iCal subscription interface is a read-only link the SMS functions are a nice way around the limitation – if you have an unlimited text messaging plan.