TechCrunch Posts Preview of the new Google CL2 Calendar

By Jeff Ubois
in

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has posted screenshots of Google’s forthcoming Ajax-based calendar, CL2. Featuring tight integration with Gmail, CL2 will support group scheduling, device synching, SMS notification, and event aggregation (subscriptions to other calendar feeds). Currently in closed beta with about 200 users, Arrington says the service a long way from becoming public.

As Shannon Clark notes, calendaring is hard, for lot of different technical and social reasons. Timezones, daylight savings, recurring events, permissions, synching, lack of standards, and the intricacies of scheduling (i.e. negotiations between people) have so far frustrated efforts to create a commonly accepted approach. While Exchange dominates inside many organizations, inter-organizational calendaring is still wide open, though CL2 just dimmed the future for the dozen or so Web 2.0 Ajax calendar companies.

Published March 9, 2006