| Google Calendar launches |
Apr. 13, 2006
[Updated Apr. 14] -- Google on April 13 launched its online calendar -- free software for tracking appointments, setting personal reminders, and planning events. Google Calendar, which supports multiple operating systems and browsers, can scan emails and Web pages for dates and times, and, with a single click, log items into an online calendar.
In addition to being operating system agnostic, Google Calendar offers collaborative calendaring capabilities, such as meeting arrangements, etc., along the lines of what is available with Microsoft Outlook. Users can send notification by emails and/or SMS text messaging about meeting announcements, post periodic meeting reminders, and obtain meeting attendance verification. Users can access the calendar from any system or device, via a single sign-on.
"First, we tried to make it fast and easy," said Google product manager Carl Sjogreen in the product announcement. "You can add events just by clicking and entering one line of simple event information. No muss, no fuss, no cumbersome forms to fill out. And it's integrated with Gmail, so you can add events mentioned in messages to your calendar with just one click."
Google Calendar opens to one-day, four-day, weekly, and monthly grids, and also includes a straight "agenda" page, where calendar event entries are listed in one place.
"We focused on helping events come alive," Sjogreen said. You can turn any event on your calendar into an invitation just by adding the email addresses of your guests. They can see and respond to your invitation, whether or not they use Google Calendar themselves. Event reminders by email and text message to your mobile phone help you remember what’s on your agenda."
Google Calendar supports the iCal standard, so it cooperates with many other calendar applications, enabling users to easily get event data in and out. Also, webmasters can add customized Google Calendar event reminder buttons to their pages, letting visitors quickly add copies of events to their calendars.
Google Calendar is the latest free tool from the Mountain View, Calif.-based search-and-software giant designed to make organizing the desktop easier for its users and entice more users into dependency on Google products, which, in turn, creates more opportunities for Google to sell its online ads. In the last three months, Google has released Google Toolbar 2 for Firefox, Google Pages, and Google Talk. Google Gmail launched last year.
Our sister site, eWEEK.com, has published the following set of articles that provide further perspective on this exciting move by Google:
Availability
To see an overview of Google Calendar, or to sign up, go here.
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