The Birth of Social Calendaring
With the release of Google Calendar, a lot of people seem to be talking about the intuitive interface, the prettiness, and of course the fact that it is AJAX — new and improved, of course. But the blogosphere seems to be overlooking the broader implications of one single feature of Google Calendar: Shared Calendars.
Shared calendars, as many will jump to point out, are nothing new. Corporate calendars are often shared, and so are resource-reservation calendars such as conference room calendars. The chief aim of these types of calendars is either to get people together (meetings), or prevent them from getting together (i.e. to prevent double bookings).
A third type of calendar has just been brought forth by Google. A calendar that everyone can edit. A calendar that everyone can put events in, and a resulting calendar that has much more value to everyone than a personal calendar. If you’ve heard these words before, you will realize that I could also be describing a Wiki. Google Calendar seems to me a Calendar Wiki — where everyone pools in their two cents, and reaps millions together.
I will be attending a conference in a few days (CHI 2006, if you must know) and I looked at the program schedule. It’s a whopping 108 pages long, in PDF. There is no way I can enter all that information into a calendar for copying to my iPod or viewing in iCal (as has been my workflow so far.) But if even a fraction of the thousands of attendees adds in the event description for their own paper, or their own presentation, the task is not so daunting after all.
On the day of the conference, I could happily download a copy onto my read-only PDA and not have to fumble around with paper calendars or program schedules 108-pages thick.
Welcome to the world, social calendaring!
Update: Lauren pointed out that her calendaring solution has been doing this for some time already. Irrespective (and there will be other solutions too), I do believe the Google brand has the potential to do to calendaring what GMail did to webmail.
