- Hot news
- How do we use calendars? Possible motivation for online calendars
- How I currently use calendars and what I'd like to see
- interesting UI features in gcal
- integration issues
- state of APIs in this space
- creation of markets of events and subscriber to events
- Python specific issues
Hot news
Online calendars are trendy right now. For instance, hot news from last week is the release of ![[WWW]](/www/moin/htdocs/classic/img/moin-www.png){kind=small}
Google Calendar. Here's some sample coverage:
How do we use calendars? Possible motivation for online calendars
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what calendars (paper and electronic) do you use?
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what type of shared calendaring do you use?
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what would you like to see?
Right now, small numbers of people right now will use an online calendar: Charlene Li's Blog: Google Calendar creates a platform for "time" applications: "But their penetration thus far has been very low. USA Today has the numbers - it appears that only 1-2% of all Internet users are using online calendars today." according to Saro Saravan.
I looked for the USA Today article. Best I could come up with so far is: USATODAY.com - Google unveils calendar service. The article mentions AOL and MSN calendars, ones that I am biased against.
It would be interested to learn about the market statistics about who uses calendars and in what ways. I would expect that the OSAF people know a lot about this topic. They include: Mitch Kapor’s Blog and other OSAF people. I look, for instance, at Google Calendar, a discussion about google calendar.
How I currently use calendars and what I'd like to see
Current situation
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EccoPro, my PIM, is the center point. Treo 600 is synched to Ecco Pro.
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CalAgenda Home for IST/IU and some other campus people
things that I might want to do with calendars
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figuring out more comprehensive calendar synchronization among my electronic -- and paper -- calendars
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I'd like to set up an electronic calendar for my wife and me.
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currently, we have a Georgia O'Keefe paper calendar that will hang from our fridge.
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considering an online calendar for that purpose -- though it would be one I would have to take the responsibility for keeping up to date.
Electronic options I'm considering
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Yahoo! Calendar Yahoo calendar(s), especially once the API comes out. Not fancy but I have friends already using Yahoo groups.
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Planzo.com (has an API)
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Spongecell (because it has an API)
Laura uses Apple iCal occasionally -- so I will have to factor this in. She may want to synchronize her personal calendar with our family calendar.
Desktop options I'm thinking about:
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later on -- Chandler
I currently don't see a big need to publish my calendar publicly on the web.
interesting UI features in gcal
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multiple calendars
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subscribing to calendars -- can be powerful....will look for examples
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natural language input of events
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on 30boxes, allows a Mycroft plugin to add events:
mozdev.org - mycroft: download
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debate on whose is best
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email integration
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there's supposed to be good gcal/gmail integration -- but I couldn't make it happen.
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searching people's public calendars in Google I think can be a killer application.
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easy publishing of your own events off your calendar -- just by putting an event on one's public calendar.
integration issues
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the platform issue: Google and Yahoo are probably best positioned to be the big online platform
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I'm under the impression that a big barrier is the Microsoft Outlook is not a nice player
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import and export vs synchronization
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sometimes just import -- don't want to make it easy for users to leave
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e.g., right now, this is true of gcal
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iCal or CSV for Microsoft Outlook
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mechanisms that can be used
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data format
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XML coming from Google's calendar
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looks like Atom....hmmm....any standard (nicer) way to stick event data into Atom?
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iCalendar
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http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/aviojmi7mtr3einkbth1vm0d1g@group.calendar.google.com/public/basic is an iCalendar file that can be imported into Outlook, etc.
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transport format
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email
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RSS/Atom
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direct API
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conduit software
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semantic web type experimentation
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TechnicaLee Speaking: SPARQL Calendar Demo: Growing Our RDF Dataset
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RDF Calendar - an application of the Resource Description Framework to iCalendar Data
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RSS 1.0 Event module -- used in Atom?
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ical -> RDF in Python
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standards: iCalendar
state of APIs in this space
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having APIs will be "nice"
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Charlene Li's Blog: Google Calendar creates a platform for "time" applications
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ProgrammableWeb.com » Blog Archive » Calendar and Event APIs
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Google calendar API coming "soon"
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though there's hacking going on already:
Google Calendar Hacks and Notes
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APIs currently available
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30boxes:
30 Boxes API
creation of markets of events and subscriber to events
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pc4media: Event Search + Calendar + Invitations + RSVP + Ad Tools for Events is a thoughtful analysis.
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Google is showing how to push events into its calendar -- but its coupling is tight. Nonetheless, people are building to it
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other players: e.g.,
Trumba - Examples of Trumba Website Calendars intermediating....B2B helping event providers push events to individual calendars. Looking at trumba showed me shows the syntax for pushing to individual calendars
relating this back to microformats. e.g., Mark Pilgrim put out a bounty for a GM script that would export hCalendar to Google calendar: [uf-discuss Google at it again]. He got a quick response: ®¤©: weblog: Google hCalendar pointing to http://randomchaos.com/software/firefox/greasemonkey/googlehcalendar/googlehcalendar.user.js
Python specific issues
I'm in the middle of sorting out the complications around timezones in Python so that I can convert between the localtime of the OS and UTC in making iCalendar files. It has turned out to be more involved than expected.
Do I have to install something like pytz - World Timezone Definitions for Python to get an adequate supply of instantations of the tzinfo class?
I already have the following installed:
