Google Launches Google Calendar

After lots of rumors and the usual coyness on Google's part, Google has finally released Google Calendar, which is now available at http://www.google.com/calendar. You will need a Google account to use it, and of course it's in beta, because it's just not a Google launch if it's not in beta.

The first time you log in you'll be asked to specify your time zone and your preferred name. That having been done, you'll get a screen that looks rather like GMail, except where your messages be you'll see a calendar layout (looks like the default view is a week, but you also have the option to see day, month, next four days, and an agenda.

Controls on the left, allowing you to create a new event or do a "quick add." The quick add is a single line that allows you to quickly enter an event (ie, "Dinner with Fred next Sunday at 3pm.") If Google Calendar understands your date structure it just dumps the event in your calendar. (And it's pretty smart -- it understood "Party with Fred at 2pm three days from now" though it listed the event on the calendar as "Party with Fred from now.")

If Google Calendar doesn't understand your single-line description of the event, you're taken to the same screen you'll see when you choose to create an event. Here among other things you can specify time and span for events, invite people to your event, choose when you want to be reminded (if at all) and specify whether the event is public or private.

I remember that one of the criticisms I had about Google's RSS feed reader when it first launched is that it felt very isolated, especially compared to something like Bloglines. There did not seem an easy way to share and work with other users. I do not have this complaint with Google Calendar. You can search other available calendars and import events (8 results for DDR if you're looking for competitions), invite people to be part of Google Calendar, and create iCal and RSS feeds for your calendar if you choose to make its events public. You can set a level of privacy where people can see nothing, merely see your free/busy information (are you free or busy on a certain date, etc.) or see all your events. (You can also make a calendar private and make individual events public.) You can add people to your calendar and given them different levels of access to change events, add them, etc. Nicely thought out.

If you want to import events from other places there are several public calendars to search as well as more generic calendars of holidays (for different countries, etc.) You can also specify the address of an iCal calendar if you know it. (Some initial experiments with choosing search keywords and adding 2006 inurl:ical in order to find calendars on the regular Google search engine were interesting.)

On the one hand this feels more complete to me and a more solid product launch than many of Google's other offerings lately. I found myself planning how I would use it, which is always a good sign. On the other hand, it's hard for me to instinctively feel where this fits in Google's existing products and services and plans. I wonder if we're going to look back on this five years from now and understand that Google Calendar was the actual first part of Google's often-rumored Google Office service? Ask me again in 2011.

Posted to Search Engines-Google