Data Circle

Rumours of a Google calendar service have been doing the rounds for some time, but as of today the service has been properly launched under the unassuming name of Google Calendar. The calendar service is apparently tied into Gmail, although I’ve not managed to figure out quite how this works yet.

To be honest though, I’m surprised that it’s taken Google so long to launch this service. Yahoo! have offered a calendar service since 1998, and given how many boffins Google employs I would have thought they could have got some form of calendar service up and running before now. There is some interesting stuff involving natural language processing though – apparently you can specify “lunch on Sunday at 1pm” and the service will interpret that correctly. Since natural language processing is a real pain to get right (I’ve only covered a tiny amount of it in my degree course, and believe me it’s not easy) I’m prepared to cut them a bit of slack. I’m also somewhat surprised that support for syncronising calendars with external programs such as Outlook hasn’t been implemented as I suspect this would be an extremely useful feature for many people.

Further coverage

• Google acts to organise your life at BBC News – Technology
• Google Calendar Almost There at GigaOM
• Google unveils Web-based calendar app at News.com
• Google Opens Calendar Beta at Beta News
• Google unveils Web-based calendar app at ZDNet
• Google Calendar at Slashdot
• It’s about time at Official Google Blog