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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."
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.
Be better in bed. Wikiafterdark!
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.
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.
Hello, I'm Googlebot.
I recently discovered your post criticizing Google on Slashdot, and I am here to help you. You are now banned from the internet. Thank you for your past usage, and we hope to welcome you back in the future when you've accepted Google into your life.
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!
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.
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.
why does the porridge bird lay his eggs in the air?
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'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.
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.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
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.
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)
- Think for yourself, question authority.-
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
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
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.
You make a good point, but don't forget that Google has Orkut, too. If there was a way to leverage your social network to determine which calendars are actually relevant to you -- well, that could be pretty sweet!
...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.
Face it, do something enough times, and it can cause problems.
"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?!
Imagine the targeted links they'll put on calendar entries for your mother's birthday, your quarterly performance review and a blind date...
I can't wait.
Wouldn't it be cool if blogging crashed like the dot-com boom? Just think:
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"
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.
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?
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.
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)..