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Google's New Calendar CL2
pvt_medic writes "Google is apparently working on its own calendar (CL2) program to integrate with Gmail. The closed beta is ongoing with about 200 participants - people involved are not allowed to invite outsiders to see the calendar and are under strict rules not to share any details with outsiders. Here are some leaked photos of the CL2."
I'm guessing this will be one, of posssibly many, new things Google will be releasing April 1st. Knowing Google's history for releasing things on this date, it seems logical.
google.slashdot
Well, with only 200 participants it does make finding the source of the leak noticably easier...
How long until law enforcement uses the Google Calendar to solve crimes? Say the local QuikEMart is knocked off, they just have to Google it: Knock off QuikEMart at 10PM brings up one hit: Snake.
Oh You POS
Because GooCal will obsolete all other calendars!
Access to it anywhere you have an internet connection. Not everyone has a laptop or pda. Typing events on a cell phone is slow. The other time we've used one is when we share a calendar at work.. say if one of us is covering interviews for another, we'll use an online calender to prevent overlaps.
I dont know about anyone else but I had a good chuckle from this:
"people involved are not allowed to invite outsiders to see the calendar and are under strict rules not to share any details with outsiders. Here are some leaked photos of the CL2."
I love the internet.
[alk]
The same reason people use groupware. They want to be able to easily schedule events with others.
How we know is more important than what we know.
How about dynamic calendar subscriptions?
Select your classes from a schedule and have each period from now until the end of the year added for you. If the Prof gets sick, your calendar is updated automatically. Subscribe to your local concert club's schedule and see who's coming. Mark a show you're interested on and get automated notice when it's postponed.
Add some classification and filtering (which GMail is already well known for) and now you can just click the "Entertainment" tab and see all the movies, concerts, shows, book signings, lectures, plays, etc going on in the upcoming week.
This could be really cool.
Google never ceases to impress me. It seems that they always have something new up their sleeves. Earlier today I was reading about a program called, "Wrightly" (also posted on /.) that is supposed to be the killer Google Word Processor App that everyone's been talking about.
Anyway, what I really find amazing is Google's ability to find and promote those technologies that we would never have heard of. For example, Picasa and Google Earth. I played with Google' Earths previous self (KH) but I didn't want to pay $30 or whatever they were charging... and I would have passed Picasa off as yet another cheap knock-off.
I'm not saying that these are great programs in anyway, but they sure are great for free stuff... and that really amazes me -- Google really does have an aptitude for providing quality "free" software.
Matt Wong
http://www.themindofmatthew.com
I'm a student who uses campus computers at times, I work in an office, and I divide the little time that remains between my own home and my partner's. Between all of these points, any sort of synchronisation with a diary app is extremely unlikely, and with assignments, work events & a social life (yeah, right) all slipping randomly from my mind, I can see the value in this. Sure, an actual diary might be an idea, but I'm used to logging on to my gmail account every time I sit at a desk, whereas over the past few years I've tried half a dozen times to get into the habit of using a proper diary, and I fail miserably, usually after writing and promptly forgetting to check a single entry.
Even funnier is that if you take the images into gimp and change the levels to make all the colours really dark, what looks like a username stands out quite legibly in two of the images.
:)
Hope you don't work at google, solomanj
Will Google let people use their application logic without requiring we store our personal data on their servers (subject to cracking, government requisition, backup tapes "lost in the mail", etc)? For that matter, how easy is it now to connect our own Jabber networks to Google's version?
--
make install -not war
I found the page was a little slow, so before it goes down completely, here are the screenshots. Also works for the lazy. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
In a perfect (or even reasonably sane) world, all platforms and programs would freely exchange XML calendar records. But who am I kidding? That would be too easy. In my world, a PocketPC can't even reliably synchronize calendar information with Outlook.
Yeah, those Google mail and map sites didn't really pan out, did they.
What web site do you use for search, by the way?
This reminds me a interesting article JMZ wrote on the subject of groupware. It's worth reading just for the quote "How will this software get my users laid", but it's got some good points that are relevant here. I daresay Google's been reading it too.
With their talents and GMail's strengths, it looks like they're ready to come out with just what JMZ is proposing. Which may make Hula dead in the water, but we'll just have to wait and see...
Actually, I'd say that they have always been a company focused on a few things. They've hired a good number of good scientists.
Some of this stuff requires fairly complicated techniques from the realm of research.
Need an example. Get the calendar to sufficiently put a short summary of everything that's going on in its cells by extracting that data from your email.
You're assuming that someone from google didn't leak it.
It's been said that there's no such thing as bad publicity. Making something 'secret' only adds to the interest.
Did Earth Detox Cause Mass Extinctions 65 Million Years Ago?
Everyone is saying "the point is so that you can access your calendar from anywhere."
Whatever happened to the popular Slashdot meme: Don't access [Online Service that requires a password] from public places?
About the only places I would consider 'secure' are home, work, or a friend's house. And I wouldn't be so sure about the friend's house, because some of my friends are sneaky bastards like that.
Taking the Calendar away from a fixed computer, or appt. book or laptop/pda seems like it'll encourage people to check their schedule everywhere. Because, if the point is not to check it anywhere, then why not keep your schedule with you? Home ---> work doesn't seem very troublesome to me.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
One word: integration. A good standalone calendar is ok. But if you can get the map where you have an appointment, the exact text of the email that triggered it, a fast search to find anything remotely related to the topic, instant chatting with the people in the meeting if you need to ask something, etc as pale examples of what all combined could be used, you have far more. Of course, google based means that you must access internet to access all of this. A portable pda could be superior if you are on the run and without that access. But now even cellphones have access to gmail and related sites, so in many places access to that information can be done in several ways, and for all will be the same.
Finally there is (at least in theory) an answer: CalDAV. It's big and complex, but there seems to be some real progress in implementing it, just take a look at the interoperability testing events/reports.
Then again, you mentioned Outlook... Just forget everything I said.
Well, if we're lucky they'll throw their efforts into OpenSync, a very good effort to make a standard for exchanging data between (among other things) calendars and pda's.
;)
And you can always "upgrade" your pda to Linux
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. -- Andrew S. Tanenbaum
Before we went to the Julian calendar, a lunar calendar more than sufficed. Just add a leap second for every 1200 years or so, to compensate for lunar drift.
Ironically, we wouldn't have had to deal with all of these end time religious types (who decided to ignore the difference between the two) today, since their end of the world prophecies would have been scheduled for at least a few hundred years from now, rather than based on the year 2000.
Missing Mars due to a glitch in converting imperial to metric is one thing, destroying the Earth to speed up various religious prophecies due to a glitch in calendar systems is another.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
I will really like this. Mail, chat and calendar all in one place, with a nice interface and enough storage. I usually do work from 3 different places, from 4 computers, and accessing everything from Gmail will be a fine indeed, easier than always synch.ing calendars, and sometimes forgetting to do so. What we could spend quite an amount of time talking about would be privacy and security related issues, but I'm willing to lower some bars if this thing will be as functional as I expect it to be.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
http://www.google.com/cl2 yields a login prompt that says:
"Sign in to Google CL2 with your Google Account"
So now that Google already knows what we're searching for and can read our e-mail, it will also be able to know what we're doing at any given time? I'm definitely signing up!! What's next, Google Personal Diary? Google Thought Recorder?
Remember the quote, "We're moving to a Google that knows more about you" ? You'd better.
Google - It just gets Beta and Beta
They use this one - http://goog-ajaxslt.sourceforge.net/
It's amazing - just a day or two ago, I was thinking how convenient it would be to have a calendar in Gmail, rather than have my schedule sitting in Outlook on my home desktop and doing nothing.
And now it turns out they're working on it.
And just a few months ago, I was hoping that Google would make an Israel version of Google News - and that came out on Tuesday, and looks great.
How often does it happen that a company consistently puts out programs and services that you'd wanted to use before they made them?
I don't think many people are aware of it but a 'new' standard is finally emerging that allows mobile devices to synchronize over the internet. A great number of mobile phones and smartphones (like my Nokia 9300) support this. See the website below for a list of devices that support SyncML. So does the Mozilla Sunbird Calendar...
;)
List of devices: https://www.mobical.net/mobical/phonesetup/
What use is an online calendar if it doesn't support online synchronisation?
I know that Gmail has ignored the wonderful imap standard, so I'm not entirely cnvinced they won't ignore this one.
So: Please Google, don't be evil, and use the open SyncML standard
X.
The original host is down, so I have taken my life and bandwidth allowance in my hands and stuck a mirror up. http://jaduncan.net/google-calendar-cl2-leaked-pic tures
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
Google Talk is a full Jabber app, but with voice added as well. XMPP alone should increase its rankings as a good app.
The interface is clean, simple, uncluttered and very straight forward and easy to use. The integration with Gmail is far and away the best Web conversion I have ever seen of any IM client. MSN Webmessenger and the web version of Yahoo! Messenger are no where near close to being as good as the Gmail Chat version of Google Talk.
Then consider that any Jabber network can chat with people using Google Talk. If you are connected via jabber.org (or any other Jabber network) you can chat with gtalk users just by adding them to your list. Don't need to use any extra protocols or plugins.
Then consider the future proofing of using XMPP over creating yet another IM protocol. XMPP is exceptionally modular and the clients talk to the servers in exactly the same language that the servers talk to each other in. So adding new services/features on the server side won't always require a client upgrade. Not to mention that XMPP is unburdened by patent issues and the license is pretty damn good by most people's opinion.
Also consider connecting with the other networks. Google will be able to easily implement the shared connection with AOL simply because all thats required is a plugin on the server side. The client wouldn't need to be upgraded. If in future MSN and Yahoo! decide to stop trying to hedge their share of the IM pie, communication with their networks would also be exceptionally easy.
Jabber has a huge following in the corporate environment. Businesses like it because they can control it to meet their own policies. This is also especially true of financial organisations. Now those organisations can extend their network to chat with Google Talk connected clients/partners/associates without having to give up that control internally.
Google Talk is a fantastic step in the right direction and the fact that Google even donated libjingle to the Jabber community as a whole means that everyone has gotten something beneficial out of it. I don't doubt Google will offer more in the future too.
And none of this mentions the fact that even though Google is very much an advertising company, there is no advertising at all in the Google Talk client. Not even Microsoft, AOL or Yahoo! can make that claim. They're not even primarily advertising companies in the way Google is.
Google Talk is more than just a simple or bland client. I gave up using all others when it was released simply because of how clean the interface is. I don't need graphical smilies or useless animations in my chats. They don't convey anything I cant achieve with old school text emoticons in the first place.
I logged in to MSN Messenger the other day for the first time in a long while. I wanted to send a message to my cousin in a different city who doesn't use Gmail. I was absolutely taken back by how cluttered the interface is. So many features of no value at all. Many of which can't even be turned off. Not to mention how bulky the interface just 'felt'. It was like going from a sports car back to a family sedan.
No thanks. I'll take Google Talk over any other vendor client on the market today. I even prefer it over the old favourites like GAIM and its like.