Google Inc. is introducing a free Web calendar service for consumers to schedule events and share them with others, opening a new level of competition with rivals such as Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp.
The beta version of Google Calendar, which can be accessed with a Gmail account, enables users to search for and add events from within the program or through Web sites that use open standards for calendars. Such sites are invited to add Google Calendar buttons next to events they list.
Google Calendar, offers a variety of features to make using Web calendars as easy as desktop calendars such as Outlook, allowing users to "drag and drop" events from one calendar to another.
Users of the new Google application can also access events from friends’ shared calendars and import events from Microsoft Outlook. Once they add events, they can use a "Search My Calendars" search-bar to find them. Events can also be created by typing simple messages like "Lunch with Kate 11:30 a.m. Wednesday" in the program’s "Quick Add" bar.
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.
The new service takes advantage of slick Web programming tricks using Javascript and XML along with RSS. But perhaps the biggest breakthrough is the calendar’s use of "natural language processing" technology that simplifies how events are entered.
The application interoperates with other calendaring programs that use Apple Computer’s iCal or XML standards. In the coming months, Google Calendar will be able to synchronize with Outlook and mobile devices, Product Manager Carl Sjogreen said. The application works best with Microsoft Internet Explorer version 6 and higher, and with Firefox 1.07 and higher. Users must have JavaScript and cookies enabled, Google said.
"Google Calendar takes all the events in my life and keeps them in one place," Sjogreen said in a phone interview.
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.
Several analysts said they were impressed with the product.
"We enable the user to create multiple calendars, share them with other people and overlay Web calendars back on the user’s own calendar," the Google product manager said.
Google, in the past six months or so, has put things out there that were good, but not the typical wow, and I think the Google Calendar has that, said Chris Sherman, executive editor of Search Engine Watch. "The interface is classic Google–clean, crisp and relatively uncluttered."
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. "The one down side to the program is, you have to be online when you use it," he added.
"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 is no reason why you should not 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."
Pressing Other to Innovate
Details of the long-rumored calendar, complete with screenshots of features and instruction guides, had leaked out in late February among Silicon Valley technology enthusiasts.
The calendar poses a direct challenge to Yahoo Calendar, the No. 1 Web calendar service in the United States, which was introduced in 1998 and has changed little in substance in recent years. But Google said it plans to "play nice" and allow users to share Google Calendar events with Yahoo Calendar.
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 have incorporated Groove-like features into the next version of Windows Vista. If that is true, this is kind of a pre-emptive strike."
While Sjogreen is careful to say that Google Calendar is not designed to replace corporate calendars, it could raise expectations among office workers that its features should be part of corporate scheduling systems like Microsoft’s Outlook or IBM’s Lotus Notes.
Sjogreen said Google is working to offer seamless connections to Microsoft Outlook, the Palm Treo smartphone and to various other mobile phone calendars in coming months.
Some Google watchers had expected Google to launch its calendaring application at a conference late last year, at which executives speaking on panels predicted that calendaring would be the next killer app for the Web.
The trial version of Google Calendar is being offered in English. Gmail users will begin being offered the service within the next week. In coming months, Google will translate the calendar into multiple languages, Sjogreen said.
The Sunnyvale, California-based rival of Google said in a statement that the company is working on updates to Yahoo Calendar, which it plans to release in coming months.
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.
The major search and portal companies are in a race to offer the most useful Web-based applications to a growing Internet-savvy population that is increasingly moving its life off paper and onto the Web.
Users of Google’s free e-mail service Gmail may find the Google Calendar particularly useful. Google’s software scours Gmail to recognize mentions of events and then automatically offers the user to add the date information to the calendar.
At the moment, the calendar works best with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Firefox. In the coming months, Google aims to make it synchronise with Outlook and mobile devices.
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