Google has rolled out its online calendar tool available free to users with a Gmail account.
Google Inc. recently unveiled an online calendar in a bid to compete with Yahoo Inc.’s popular Web calendar and Microsoft Corp.’s widely-used Outlook desktop program.
The calendar can be accessed at www.google.com/calendar, although at the time of writing the service was suffering a lot of interruptions, presumably because of the interest generated by the launch.
It has a feature list roughly in line with what you would expect from a desktop-based calendar, including drag and drop and the ability to view your diary as a day, week, a month or, bizarrely, the next four days. It is a thoroughly impressive piece of coding and it is easy to forget that you aren’t using a software calendar.
Being Google, the calendar is tightly integrated with their other services including Gmail. In fact you can create entries directly from dates mentioned in Gmail emails.
The Internet search giant said it has no immediate plans to sell advertising on the product, which will enter a testing cycle technology companies refer to as a beta release.
Its features were favorably received by analysts briefed on the product. The calendar uses "natural language" technology so that it can process entries written informally, such as "dinner with Alice at 7:30 pm." It also is faster than other Web calendars because of it uses AJAX, or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, a technique for creating interactive Web pages, said Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester Research.
The calendar allows users to send invitations to events; coordinate outings and share schedules with others. Users can merge their schedules with that of a spouse or with the online schedules of organizations such as the Oakland A’s baseball team.
The calendar can be exported to Microsoft Outlook if you decide to return to the dark side and you can import your messages in from other major calendar tools if you just want to give it a try. If you like you can create separate diaries, allowing you to keep work and home apart, but this seems like a slightly redundant feature to TechSmec.com. If you need to be reminded of things going on in your life you can elect to be notified of events via email, or if you are in the USA, via SMS.
Google hopes to encourage its use by making available technology to let third party developers create desktop applications that interact, says Carl Sjogreen, a Google product manager.
The new product will nevertheless be another flash point for competition with Microsoft and Yahoo. Yahoo, which makes the most popular online Calendar, has had a calendar on the market for eight years. It offers features allowing people to share schedules, send invitations and is working on updates to the product expected in coming months, says spokesperson Karen Mahon.
Li says she expects to see an online calendar from Microsoft. The company’s Outlook is widely used today on desktop computers.
Analysts say the Google calendar has a lot of potential for hosting online advertising. However, Sjogreen says the company is not placing ads in the product at present, and "we have no specific plans I can comment on."
Google is not scanning the content of people’s calendars, he adds.
This is not an obvious progression for Google, but it is certainly one which should shake up the market. Microsoft and Yahoo will be watching with interest.