Late last night Google launched another beta product: Google Calendar. I’d link up the mainstream news article that alerted me, but they didn’t link to the site. Man I hate that. If you write about something, spend an entire article talking about it and it’s not a bad neighborhood or spam, then link to it. Toward the end of this review, you’ll find links to folks who did link up Google Calendar.

Registering and adding events
Registering was a breeze. I visited the page, entered in my time zone and was sent to the calendar.

The first thing I wanted to put on the calendar was my wife’s doctor’s appointment. The appointment is at 2:45pm but then noticed times were in 30 minute increments only. Did I miss some way to make appointments at other times? I want to be able to make appointments at any time of the day, not just half hour and hours.

One cool thing is how if you put in an address or city/state it will automatically put in a link to the map when hovering over the event. Handy except where you put in things like “IRC” (see picture below) and it doesn’t know where to link.

I wondered, could “where” be changed to a clickable URL, IRC location etc instead of map coordinates? My attempts to change that didn’t work, has anybody found a way to do this yet?

And how do you cancel the reminder timer for an already scheduled event? Can you only disable/cancel once the popup message appears? Also, every event starts with a default reminder timer of 10 minutes before the event. That would work for online events but that’s inadequate for events where you actually have to travel somewhere.

Fortunately, the default setting can be increased or disabled by visiting Calendar Settings -> Notifications.

Also note the various additional options of getting notified each day including phone notification, SMS, email or popup (only for the events notification). The agenda email option at 5am each day is a nice idea but again doesn’t look like that time can be configured which is a bummer for those who are already on the commute (guess they could just pick up at work).

Need to pay special attention to this timer field which is at the very bottom of the form and easy to miss when quickly creating new events. The first couple events added I didn’t even notice it was there.

What do others think about Google Calendar?
Sure to be many opinions, as there are whenever Google releases something new, here’s a few that caught my eye.

Danny Ayers: “Looks pretty nice, functionality seems basic but worked for me.”
Silicon Beat points out that Gmail isn’t required to use and: “… we find it very useful, but part of us wonders whether it will be vulnerable to the same bugs as Gmail (with occasional server shut downs, etc). And it feels blocky in parts…”
A warning from tech.life.blogged: “be careful, if you are in Calendar via HTTPS, clicking the link to GMail takes you to the unencrypted (HTTP) session.”
Jack Schofield at the Guardian: “at first glance, it seems a decent competitor to Yahoo’s Calendar, the market leader online, which has been around since the last century, and the two dozen new entrants such as 30 Boxes.”
Wendy Boswell at Search Engine Journal takes a look at the privacy policy.
Another 30boxes casualty in ConversionRater: “Unfortunately for 30Boxes, which I’ve enjoyed thus far, Google Calendar is probably far enough ahead that I switch over to using it.”
Charlene Li: “I’ve gotten pretty attached to that Yahoo! view over the past eight years! But I have a suspicion that we’ll probably be using Google Calendar in the long run.”
Search Engine Watch: “Trying the Google Calendar is low-risk—if you don’t like it, you can simply export your information and import it back into your current calendar app.”
Google Blogoscoped is concerned about scaling and points to Matt Cutts comments about the need for sync to PDAs. In my tests so far, scaling hasn’t been an issue.
Mark Evans thinks: “… it’s probably another part of Google’s nudge-nudge, wink-wink Trojan Horse strategy to become the Microsoft of Web 2.0. By launching new services in a progressive or staged way, Google is going after the consumer productivity market from several fronts.”
Om Malik: “Someone who is gotten spoiled by 30Boxes and Zimbra’s calendaring application, Google Calendar is going to look pretty mundane. However, for main stream users looking for a simple web-based calendar that is easy to use,”

Online calendars and maps
The biggest problem with online calendars, and it’s not just this effort from Google but every online calendar or mapping service, is the fact that they are web-based applications. With my Pocket PC, I can program in timed events in one minute increment and can carry the information around with me and update it whenever I want. How do I change an appointment in Google Calendar on the road with no internet when the office calls? Contrast that to using Microsoft Streets & Trips for mapping which is especially useful when the GPS is added and I can tap into my Pocket PC for appointment/contact/event changes offline.

Google Maps and Google Calendar — and all their web-based competitors — simply do not provide this important functionality unless I have internet access. I’ve pointed to this time and again with all these web apps, it’s a major flaw in their real world usefulness and practicality. We can swoon about how cool this stuff is but the reality is will people actually use this? Is it useful?

Probably one of the most useful Google Calendar features for webmasters, podcasters and people with events is sharing their events easily with others via Google:

You can add a Google Calendar event reminder button to your site by inserting a special snippet of HTML into your page. Users who click on your button can quickly save your event on their Google Calendars.

If you are wired or wireless, you bet Google Calendar is useful, otherwise, well, think I won’t be trading in my PDA anytime soon.

Update 4/15/06 5:58pm PST: Ejas Patel points out that you can type in precise times into Google calendar if you want.

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