The company behind the world’s most popular search engine has just launched a new program that allows users to save and receive reminders for events, meetings, and more via the web. The Google Calendar version began online testing on April 12.
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Google Calendar. (PC World) |
Carl Sjogereen, Google’s product manager, expressed caution when discussing Google Calendar. He denied the notion that this project was related to the open-source office suite OpenOffice.org, but revealed that the new service would be integrated into several products like Gmail and personal Google homepages.
Users can enter information about new events via email or use the QuickAdd feature. Whenever an appointment is created, Google Calendar will send invitations to other participants and reminders to the user.
Additionally, Google allows users to search for and subscribe to public calendars, such as the schedule of a football team or movie showtimes, and integrate them into their own calendar.
Google Calendar, supporting the iCal data exchange standard, will enable users to share calendars with each other using RSS technology and may potentially outpace the online invitation service Evite.com from IAC/InterActive.
For over a year, the blogging community has speculated that Google would eventually venture into the calendar space. “I guarantee they will do it,” wrote Jeremy Zawodny, an engineer at Yahoo, on his blog in February of last year. “There have been too few developments in the calendar world over the past few years, and perhaps Google is looking to change that.”
