The Practical Side of Social Media

With all the buzz around social media these days, one of the most powerful elements may be upon us in a most mundane tool - the calendar.

Google launched their Google calendar yesterday (calendar.google.com). And wow, what a nice job they've done.

Coupled with their recent purchase of writely.com, Google has married two of the most powerful Microsoft apps (word processing and scheduling) with gmail to form a killer toolset. All free and available on the web.

Back to Google calendar.... There are a whole slew of cool features, but those that really set this apart from anything else around are:

Manage Multiple Calendars (work, personal, etc) and view them separately or together.

Sharing - Calendars can be shared with others, and you can subscribe to othersÂ’ shared calendars. Read/write permissions can be granted on a per user basis. Calendars can be published via a web page or via RSS, so readers do not need to be on the Google Calendar platform.

Importing - You can import events from other calendar programs, including Yahoo Calendar and Microsoft Outlook.

These 'integration' features take many of the benefits we've come to love in the enterprise version of outlook and move it from behind the firewall.

Now families can really have a LCD on the refridgerator with a consolidated calendar of each family member's schedule - sync'd with the parents office calendar and the kid's gmail accounts.