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April 15, 2006

5 Ideas To Make Google Calendar A Success

Google Calendar is a good product, but it could become a great product if it becomes more accessible to the users. For the moment, no search box in Google Calendar has an action URL set in HTML, they are accessible only via JavaScript and the output is made for Ajax.

PROBLEM: I have to show the sport events of my softball team to my mom.

SOLUTION: Users should have a permanent address like http://calendar.google.com/username/calendarname that displays public events in a human-readable form (like PHP iCalendar does). You could share this URL to people that don't use Google Calendar.


PROBLEM: I've created a calendar of great cultural events in New York. How can the visitors of my site grab the calendar to their accounts without copy-paste?

SOLUTION: Google should provide an address like http://calendar.google.com/addcalendar?url=calendar_address you can put on a site, so visitors can easily add your calendar.


PROBLEM: You like to search events with Google Toolbar or you don't want to log in to Google Calendar just to search next week's program of the Met.

SOLUTION: You should search public calendars using a simple link like http://calendar.google.com/search?q=query and output the results as a new calendar.


PROBLEM: I want to copy Italy's matches from FIFA World Cup 2006 Calendar to my calendar.

SOLUTION: There should be an easy way to mark certain events in a calendar for copying or deletion.


PROBLEM: I want to use my favourite feed reader to check today's agenda.

SOLUTION: The feeds should have parameters to sort the events by date, to show only the current events, to restrict the events to an interval. If the feed would show only the current events, you could use it the same way you check mail with Gmail feed.

Related:
Popular Google Calendars
Google Calendar module for Personalized Homepage
Google Calendar plugin for Google Desktop

6 comments:

  1. Lots of good ideas here -- some already exist.

    Check out http://www.google.com/googlecalendar/event_publisher_guide.html.

    Also, if you overlay a calendar (your world cup example) and click on the header of the event, you can easily copy those events to the calendar.

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  2. an other problem is birthdays : it is not really easy to add a birthdate in Google Calendar
    Google should solve that by using a "birthday" fonction, which automatically recopy this event every year, show the age of the person, etc...

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  3. You can create a birthday event. Choose "Repeats every year from the dropdown" when you create your event.

    When you "quick add" a birthday, Google doesn't recognize it yet. But it wouldn't be hard. Just detect the word "birthday" or some synonyms.

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  4. how can i search google public calendars through different criterias and i need to display it on my html page

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  5. I hate that google calendar doesn't show the age of the person! I can put their birth year in the notes, perhaps, but I want the calendar to calculate that for me.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I'm sharing my calendar on facebook and it only appears if i'm logged in to that account. Otherwise it just shows my US calendar but not all the other calendars I created.

    ReplyDelete

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