More features of Google Calendar

In my last post on the Google Calendar I could not for lack of total familiarity mention all the fetaures and the pluses of this tool. Here is an article that does a good job of it:

I didnt notice this but invitation management is built-in now…

Taking a page from sites such as InterActiveCorp’s Evite, Google also built invitation management into Google Calendar. Users can create event invitations to be sent to anyone with an e-mail account. They can also send event reminders via e-mail or cell phone text message, and keep track of RSVPs from within the program. People can see their schedules by day, week, month and four-day views, highlight any period from a monthly calendar for a customized view and display only certain events at a time on their calendar view.

Google is opening its API to 3rd party tools – which means some excellent and cool stuff coming in through open source arena (you gotta check the stuff that is available now for Google’s Personalized page to see what power this brings on!!)

Like it is doing with other applications, such as Google Local, the company is opening up the application programming interface so that outside developers can use it to build third-party programs that will work with Google Calendar data, Sjogreen said.

I did see the default thing.. and wasnt sure what it was set to – good they have private as the default!

Privacy concerns should be quelled by Google Calendar’s default settings, which designates all events in a person’s calendar private unless the user makes them public, Sherman said.

Look at what can possibly be done with this calendar! This could be a complete scheduling device for everything that you do on the web – including getting you news fix!

"I’m intrigued," Gartner analyst Allen Weiner said. "If it becomes successful, then it can also be the place to schedule a lot of content delivery. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to go to your calendar and say 10 a.m. every morning, ‘I would like to listen to a podcast’…and you listen to it through your calendar."

Here is what Microsoft is upto on its Outlook front… with the delays to its vista – Google may make it pay dearly for it!!

Microsoft is planning a major calendar upgrade for its Outlook 12 release later this year.

"The obvious competition (for Google Calendar) is Microsoft Outlook," Sherman said. "Microsoft recently purchased Groove Networks, which also has strong collaboration. Rumors are they’ve incorporated Groove-like features into the next version of Windows Vista. If that’s true, this is kind of a pre-emptive strike."

And Yahoo? Well despite buying the Upcoming.org they havent been fast enough to integrate those features into its calendar.. and may loose out to this Google onslaught!

Yahoo has said it is looking to integrate features from social-events calendaring site Upcoming.org–which it acquired last year–into Yahoo Calendar, the market-leading program in the United States, according to ComScore Media Metrix. Yahoo said it plans to open up the APIs for Yahoo Calendar, which integrates with e-mail and the company’s instant-messaging service.

Tags: Google Calendar, Google