Matt S. sent me a link to Google Calendar, and so far it’s pretty much exactly what I was expecting. The interface is clean and neat, just like Gmail. When you want to add an event on the calendar, a bubble pops in the time slot that you select; then, you can add more information as needed. I can’t figure out if it plays nice with other calendars (Outlook, iCal, etc), but for someone who works in a corporate environment (where nothing that syncs with your Outlook is really private) I don’t mind having my personal calendar completely separate. But it would be nice to have the option.

So far it seems to have nice collaboration abilities (adding guests to events who can make changes, sharing calendars), so this will definitely be a useful tool for a lot of people. I was also just thinking that it would be really neat if they opened up the API so that if you were on an event page, you could easily click some kind of “Add this event to my Google Calendar,” and it would do so automatically. Just like adding a del.icio.us link to your bookmark page. I’m going to play around with this for a while, but it looks like a very sweet deal so far.

UPDATE: WOW! The Quick Add feature is amazing. You can type in something like “lunch with lara at noon tomorrow” and it will add your lunch date in the appropriate time slot. That’s really freaking cool. Has import features in iCal or CSV (MS Outlook) format, but you can’t export the calendar out to a device (Ryan - “why don’t they realize that a calendar is the most important when you have it WITH YOU?”) Good point. I’m sure someone will figure something out for that rather quickly.

UPDATE 2: We found the place where you can export your calendars address for another application, under Calendar Details -> Private Address. Fantastic.