On Message with Ben Gross

Technorati Tags: Google calendar

Google’s new calendar service launched this evening, and it’s good enough to be bad news for all the web 2.0 Ajax calendar companies.

It supports Gmail integration, reminders and invitations, multiple calendars, and calendar sharing. It’s fast enough to feel pretty much like a desktop app.

The import feature works well — it took me less than a minute to import my desktop calendar data, and the company emphasizes that it handles importing of events from Microsoft Outlook and Yahoo! Calendar (which hasn’t hasn’t gotten a lot of love from Yahoo! recently). The export features allow subscriptions with iCal, or RSS/XML.

The controls, permissions, and delegation of authority to make changes are well thought out. It has some other nice touches, such as SMS notifications, reminders to cell phones, and “Quick Add,” which lets you type “lunch tomorrow at 12 with George” and then interprets this correctly to make a new calendar entry.

Calendaring is *hard* and this is just the first release. There are some possibilities embedded in the system (e.g. SMS notifications, group calendaring, and etiquette around sharing data) that will take a little time to learn. Still, I’ll be moving some things over from Yahoo! and Airset.

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