TechSmec.com

Google Calendar Challenges Microsoft and Yahoo

April 13th, 2006

Google has rolled out its online calendar tool which is available free to all users with a Google account.

The calendar can be accessed at www.google.com/calendar, although at the time of writing the service was suffering a lot of interruptions, presumably because of the interest generated by the launch.

It has a feature list roughly in line with what you would expect from a desktop-based calendar, including drag and drop and the ability to view your diary as a day, week, a month or, bizarrely, the next four days. It’s a thoroughly impressive piece of coding and it’s easy to forget that you aren’t using a software calendar.

Being Google, the calendar is tightly integrated with their other services including Gmail. In fact you can create entries directly from dates mentioned in Gmail emails.

The calendar can be exported to Microsoft Outlook if you decide to return to the dark side and you can import your messages in from other major calendar tools if you just want to give it a try. If you like you can create separate diaries, allowing you to keep work and home apart, but this seems like a slightly redundant feature to TechSmec.com. If you need to be reminded of things going on in your life you can elect to be notified of events via email, or if you are in the USA, via SMS.

This is not an obvious progression for Google, but it is certainly one which should shake up the market. Microsoft and Yahoo will be watching with interest.

Entry Filed under: Online Life