Google have today launched Google Calendar.
There are two reasons (that I have discovered so far) that it is not yet ready for the UK:
- It can remind you by SMS of events you have scheduled in your calendar only in the US;
- It can locate your meeting for you by Google Maps based on the location you enter, but only for the US.
There are also two teething problems so far:
1. Importing my work calendar from Outlook created all the events in the evening which were actually supposed to be in the day. Events at 9am were instead starting around 7pm (1900) and all other events were in the same relative position.
2. Importing a calendar of UK Public Holidays (one of the most powerful features of Google Calendar IMHO) fails completely as does any other calendar I try to import (like a schedule of XX football team’s fixtures).
Other than those comments, though, this is set to change the way we do business. If you have a meeting with clients from another company, check their Google Calendar and you know when’s convenient for them. If you have a heavy schedule and fail to see friends because of it, share your calendar with them and organise time in a transparent way.
The calendar can be shared either completely or by showing time free/busy or not shared at all. You can invite people to create their own Google Calendar and, when you start to type in the e-mail address, the addresses you have saved or previously typed into Gmail suddenly appear.
It really is excellent — I haven’t yet finished playing.
If you want to try it out, try and view my calendar using my gmail account which is my name with a full-stop between each of my names!
How long before most of what you do relies on Google? I already rely on it!
April 13th, 2006 at 11:27 pm
There are some serious privacy concerns witht eh way Google is taking over the web, I expect the Snow in Summer to post a bit about it over the next few weeks (he’s gone so far as to stop the google bot crawl and prevent google referrals).
In the meantime, worth a play, it’s got to be better than Outlook.
April 14th, 2006 at 1:50 am
yeah, I thought about privacy too.
Google was ordered to hand over certain info to the US government, are you not worried people will be able to know all your business?
April 14th, 2006 at 9:50 am
Wherever you record your information, in the modern world, corporations and governments have privacy-busting access to it.
Even if our government pretends to care modestly about human rights, they wouldn’t be averse to collecting information from you by using the CIA or China as an intermediary.
Ultimately if you use Outlook, Windows Calendar (in Vista), Google Calendar or Yahoo Mail’s built-in calendar then your information is accessible. My suggestion:
Use a filofax to plan that murder!
Aside from that rather flippant comment, though, there are serious privacy concerns. I use SearchHistory in Google so:
- They know what I search for and when
- They know where I travel when I use Google Maps to garner a route
- They know where I log on to the internet because wherever I log on, I use Google’s customised homepage and they can obtain my IP
- They know my politics (from this page and every other that their pages crawl and find information on me from)
- They know who I know from my contacts list in Google Mail (previously known as Gmail).
But, and this isn’t anything more than a pragmatic lament, there’s nothing that can be done about that in today’s world. I don’t have to use any of these Google tools — they’re just convenient. What I do have to do, though, is use the software that my employer provides for e-mail and calendar functions at work; I do have to have a bank account and no matter how I withdraw my money, corporations have to know where I am (CCTV in branches or location data from cash-machine withdrawals or cash-back collections).
Privacy is something that should be guaranteed by the state, but ultimately we’re all vulnerable to a less-than-scrupulous government.
May 25th, 2006 at 12:35 pm
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