We all now that Google is putting out some great Web 2.0 products. In this post I want to focus on their calendar. I have a work laptop, a blackberry phone and a home desktop. The challenge is being able to keep my calendar straight on all 3. Google Calendar is the solution I use. Since it is on the web I can access it on any computer and edit/update entries as needed. On the laptop and the home desktop I then use iCal. Google calendar give you either a XML, an HTML, or an iCal feed that allows you to share your calendar with other applications, feeds or websites. It really is simple to do. For iCal I just get the address from Google for my calendar, I go to iCal and chose subscribe to calendar and paste in the address. Then I get a read only view of the calendar I edit on Google. What is great about this is I can set up as many computers as I need – in this case 2 – to see the same calendar. If I am at work and make a change to the calendar within 15 minutes it is updated on my home computer.
Some things that make this even better are Google allows you to create and maintain multiple calendars. So I can keep my work, home, baseball, church, etc. calendars separate. I can color code them so they are easy to pick out. Also, Google has a lot of public calendars that you can subscribe to. For instance I subscribe to the National Holidays calendar, phases of the moon, and the Ohio State football schedule. Those calendars are created and maintained by someone else.
For my blackberry Google makes a great sync application that keeps my calendars up to date on the blackberry as well. It auto syncs so I always have an up to date calendar on my mobile phone also.
The only downside is that you have to have Internet access to update the calendar. This is true for all Web 2.0 apps and for me is really not a problem. For the odd times that I am out of Internet range I simply write down the date and update the calendar when I am back online. It is a great solution for me.
Tags: blackberry, calendar, google, iCal
