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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."
So when your, or someone else's birthday's coming, you might see more gift-related ads?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
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.
Be better in bed. Wikiafterdark!
The whole idea of google is against portals They are minimalists, they would think that a portal is silly, that google.com is as much of a portal as you need.
Be better in bed. Wikiafterdark!
NO ! I think that google is just starting to grow and still have a long way to walk, just think about Yahoo how many features they have ...
Think like a hacker, act like a hacker, but never become a hacker !
I really dont see this as a bad thing. Google is a good company. I like google and gmail its hot. Sp34k l33t
It'd be nice if they really integrated it into gmail. Yahoo already has such a feature, and it's not horrible, but I'm sure gCal could be much better.
I prefer to go crazy over the products *after* Google has released them. Mmmmm, google maps... *drools*
I'd be willing to pay money for that.
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.
More and more of Google is benefiting from registration. Google Answers requires that you register to create a question or answer one. Google Groups BETA lets you add groups to My Groups and post. GMail BETA, of course, requires a login to use. Froogle BETA lets you add products to "My Shopping List."
About the only product Google has that doesn't benefit from registration (but should) is Google News BETA. I would use it a lot more often if I could customize the types of stories I want to see more or less frequently -- like Yahoo News lets me do.
Portals are not a bad thing. My Yahoo is my home page and it works great for everything I use it for: news, stock quotes, weather, sports, and a few RSS feeds from other sites including Slashdot.
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Goodles!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
(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.)
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
"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?!
They need to target Loutus Notes and Outlook by offering the ablity to share calender events and send calendar details via gmail. This would blow yahoo and hotmail out of the water. Right now the hotmail and yahoo calendars are only useful to the one user.
Wouldn't it be cool if blogging crashed like the dot-com boom? Just think:
http://www.google.com/options/index.html
Looks like a portal to me. All they have to do is slap some ads on the left side.
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.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
Google News BETA does benefit from registration - you can create News Alerts that let you know whenever a topic you choose pops up in the news.
If google can provide corporate accounts on calendaring and gmail that makes it feel seamless and functional, while maintaining an agnostic view on platform and browser deployment, many of us would applaud and consider signing up.
As long as they don't become evil, I guess.
$0.02,
ptd
I'm an animal lover -- they're delicious!
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'