Sordid Blog

I suppose, by now, everyone’s heard that Google has developed a Calendar. I think Google was smart to acquire Writely, which is one of the best collaborative tools out there — I’m not counting Wiki’s, of course, because they’re collaborative but way higher-functioning and for mass-user-revisions, unlike Writely, on which I’m currently writing/revising two articles with a few co-authors.

Well, in their most recent move to own the web — and how users interact with it — Google developed a heavily AJAX-interface Calendar. I know there are others — my friend Todd is a big fan of Airstream — but I’m really liking Google Calendar. Check out the “monthly view”:

Days that have major reminders (that last all day or can be dealt with at any time during the day), show up in a nice bold slot at the top, as do those things that run across multiple days. Other events are broken down by time. And you just click the day and get a great AJAX-popup for entering it quickly, or you can add details by clicking a link in the popup. Very slick. The only real drawback I can see so far is that you have to have a Google account, so if I wanted to make things public on my calendar and let others see my calendar, they wouldn’t be able to unless they, too, had a Google account. That’s not so cool.

There’s also a weekly view, a four-day view, and a daily view. And, since you can add notes on appointments and other stuff, you can get an “agenda” for a day that you can print out and keep handing. That would be really useful if I ever plan a conference in advance because all my sessions could be mapped out ahead of time. Cool, huh?

But here’s the best part of all: each event can be set up to to notify you in advance (choose from hours, days, weeks, etc. before the event) by email, popup, and/or SMS!!! That’s right: my little cell phone gets a text message if I asked the calendar to sent me an SMS note. I love this function because I can get 1 - 2 hour reminders on my phone in case I’m not near my computer to check.

What this means, though, is that you need to leave your birthdays and other important events in the comments so that I can acknowledge my friends . . . otherwise, I forget like crazy. I’m sure the next addition Google will make is to add a function for when you enter the word “birthday” or “anniversary” to ask if you want to go ahead and make a card to be sent by email. Maybe I’ll be better about remembering all sorts of things from now on!