For the last hour or so, I have been dicking around with Google Calendar, which our Google Labs Overlords released upon us today, I think. My first question was how do I get my appoinments into it without retyping. Problem #1: We use GroupWise here at work, and as of this writing GCalendar (term is mine; I've not seen anyone else call it this) only accepts imports in iCal and CSV (Outlook) formats. There is no obvious or easy way to export data from GroupWise into these formats. So after some googling around, I found a kludgey way to do it. Step #1: Tell IntelliSync to send my appointments to Palm (PDA) Desktop instead of GroupWise. Step #2: Hotsync my Palm. Step #3: Export my calendar in DBA format from Palm Desktop. Step #4: Import the DBA file into Yahoo!'s calendar. Step #5: Export the Yahoo! calendar data into a CSV file. Step #6: Import the CSV file into Google calendar.
Step #7 was unexpected and very disappointing. I had to spend the next half hour or forty five minutes un-fucking all the appointments. First, everything was offset by three hours or so, even though all systems (Google, my desktop, my Palm) are set to the same time zone. Second, many appointments were on the wrong date.
So my first impressions of Google's latest "killer app" aren't that high. I mean, Yahoo! has an IntelliSync widget you can download and install that allows you to HotSync directly to their calendar. I didn't use this because I would have had to uninstall my current IntelliSync that interfaces with GroupWise. While I won't be a spoiled brat and huff about how Google didn't take into consideration users of one of the most popular PDAs on the market. It's pretty nifty as it is. I just hope they have some sort of interface on their to-do list.
Some things that are cool are (of course) the fast AJAX interface, which, like Google Maps among other apps, makes the whole experience as fast and easy as a desktop application (no postbacks to the web server, at least in the foreground). Also cool is what I call the Evite killer, the ability to invite people to an event you set up. This feature, along with the ability to make multiple calendars on your account and make them public, could give Meetup a little trouble. I mean, why pay $10 a month, when my go club and I can just interact through GCalendar? I mean, this is free groupware/collaboration software, right? What does Meetup do? You set up events, announce them to your members, and have reminders sent periodically. GCalendar can do all that. The only downer is that right now there is no interactivity with your Gmail contacts list. In other words, you have to add all the invitees manually the first time. After that, they pop up once you start typing their address, just like Gmail. What GCalendar doesn't seem to have is all the organizer support and bulletin board stuff, like polls, surveys, message boards, private messaging, and so forth. But if you don't care about that stuff, then why use Meetup at all?