Google Calendar Tasks: Coming, But In What Form?

The anonymous but authoritative Google Calendar Guide announced on 5 October in the Google Calendar group that GCal will soon have a to do/task list feature:

[from Petition for a ToDo List - Feature Requests and Miscellaneous | Google Groups]

Hey everyone - thanks for the loud and very clear feedback on your desire for a to-do/task list feature. We’re pretty passionate about to-do lists here as well, and we’ve got something in the works. Of course, we’re working to add our special Google secret sauce to the to-do lists space (which can take some time to get right,) so we don’t have something to announce just yet, but the entire team is listening to these threads closely.

Please be patient - we’ll have more to talk about soon.

This is a fairly fast response to a 12 September user petition to get Google in gear on the need for this.

Here is a sketch of what I think Google should role out:

1. Task lists are like Calendars — Should support creation of multiple named task lists, not just a single list, along the lines of multiple named calendars. Like calendars, these should be have public, shared, and private access settings.
2. Tasks should have a title, and optional fields: notes, status (incomplete, complete, etc.), time estimate, time actually spent, due date, URL, people associated with the task, etc.
3. Tasks can be assigned to or shared with others, and accepted or rejected (much like event invitations). Status information can be accessed when tasks are assigned or shared.
4. Tasks should be displayed on the calendar if a due date is assigned. (Note: would be better if due date was optionall a range, as in ‘due this sometime next week’.)
5. Tasks should be taggable. The same tagspace should be shared with calendar entries (please add those). Ultimately, it would be good if there were in the same tagspace as Gmail (get rid of the ‘labels’ term).
6. Should be an export capability to get task information in Excel or .csv formats.
7. Should be able to link Gmail email to tasks from within Gmail. Likewise, should be a browser bookmarket to select any URL and associate with a task.
8. Views should allow for any combination of feilds with specific values and tags, such as “show all tasks due this week tagged ‘Jones&co’ assigned to ‘Betty’”.
9. Email, IM, and SMS alerts should be provided.
10. Full APIs so that external apps can play.

Just a stab, but Google should be able to this done quicker than most based on the technology already in GCal and GMail.

[pointer from Garrett Rogers]