Google on Thursday unveiled a much-anticipated, free Web-based calendar application that is expected to heat up the race with Yahoo and Microsoft.
Google Calendar allows users to build online calendars that enable specific individuals or groups of people to access all or some of the events listed. A Google Mail account is not necessary to use Google Calendar.
Users can easily search for and add events to their calendars from within the program or directly off Web sites that are either publishing events using open calendaring standards or which have added a Google Calendar button to their site. Users also can search for events from friends' shared calendars and import events from Microsoft Outlook.
Google Calendar users can search for events in a search bar by typing in keywords or event or people's names. Events also can be quickly created by typing in simple messages with a day of the week and the item is automatically generated.
In addition, users can create event invitations to be sent to anyone with an email account, send reminders via email or mobile phone text message, and keep track of RSVPs from within the program. People can see their schedules by day, week, month and four-day views, highlight any period from a monthly calendar for a customised view, and display only certain events at a time on their calendar view.
The application interoperates with other calendaring applications that use Apple Computer's iCal or the XML standards. In the coming months, Google Calendar will be able to synchronise with Outlook and mobile devices, said product manager Carl Sjogreen. The application works best with Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0+ and Firefox 1.07+ or higher and users must have JavaScript and cookies enabled.
Like it is doing with other applications, such as Google Maps, the company is opening up the API so outside developers can use it to build third-party programs that will work with Google Calendar data, Sjogreen said.
Several analysts said they were impressed with the product.
"Google in the past six months or so has put things out there that were good, but not the typical wow, and I think the Google Calendar has that," said Chris Sherman, executive editor of Search Engine Watch.com. "The interface is classic Google — clean, crisp and relatively uncluttered."
Privacy concerns should be quelled by the fact that by default all events in a person's calendar are designated as private unless the user makes them public, Sherman said. "The one down side to the program is you have to be online when you use it," he added.
"I'm intrigued," said Gartner analyst Allen Weiner. "If it becomes successful, then it can also be the place to schedule a lot of content delivery. There's no reason why you shouldn't be able to go to your calendar and say 1000 every morning I would like to listen to a podcast... and you listen to it through your calendar."
The major search and portal companies are in a race to offer the most useful Web-based applications to a growing Internet savvy population that is increasingly moving its life off paper and onto the Web.
Microsoft is planning a major calendar upgrade for its Outlook 12 release later this year.
"The obvious competition [for Google Calendar] is Microsoft Outlook," Sherman said. "Microsoft recently purchased Groove Networks, which also has strong collaboration [software roots]. Rumours are they've incorporated Groove-like features into the next version of Windows, Vista. If that's true, this is kind of a pre-emptive strike."
Yahoo has said it is looking to integrate features from social events calendaring site Upcoming.org — which it acquired last year — into Yahoo Calendar, the market-leading program in the US, according to ComScore Media Metrix. Yahoo said it plans to open up the APIs for Yahoo Calendar, which integrates with email and instant messenger.
Last month screenshots of Google Calendar leaked out, while rumours of the application's existence have been around for at least a year.
Some Google watchers had expected Google to launch its calendaring application at a conference late last year, at which executives speaking on panels predicted that calendaring would be the next killer app for the Web.
