Slashdot Mirror
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."
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. 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.
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.
We run a college LUG web site ( here ) 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
As a followup, the integration can be very smooth between the different parts. In addition to formal "meeting requests", I believe Google can use their prodigious NL parsing tech to interpret "Tomorrow at 3" or "every wednesday" and give the user the option of updating their calendar.
I know I already want it.
-Zipwow
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.
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.
UPS Sucks
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.
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.)
And I'm sure many corporations would as well -- as long as there's some form of security behind it.
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 know whether my boss would be available for that 8:00 a.m. meeting.
Of course, if we had RTFA before posting, wewouldn't have needed to make this point.
--- Dan
www.googlestore.com
Web calendars suck - it's Thursday the 3rd of March where I live...what day is it for you? Still the 2nd? ummmmmm
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.
Then try this. 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.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
The idea is that google sells the company a box that runs on the company's lan.
If you're in the US, try: wunderground.com intellicast.com
First, download Mozilla Calendar
/var/lib/dav/lockdb
/var/lib/dav and /var/lib/dav/lockdb exist and have read/write by the Apache user.
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.
Are you kidding? Outlook does a poor job on the PC
...and neither of them are web based.
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.
To me, weather info is the kind of thing I like to have around all the time, so I use the WeatherFox Firefox extension.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
That's why they invented this funny thing called a "time zone"
You tell the calendar (and your computer needs to know it too, thats how IT knows what time it is) what time zone you're in, and WOW... it can show a different time for you than it does for me.
Amazing how those things work, isn't it?
I think Google should fix and maintain their old services before launching new ones. Images search has been broken for ages. Maybe they don't have the talent to fix it after-all.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/07/2
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.
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.
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.]
Kid-proof tablet..
Seems like they already caught the opportunity...
Assembling etherkillers for fun an profit