Connected Calendar Tipping Point

It’s becoming quite obvious that the connected calendar is reaching a sort of tipping point. There have been all kinds of blips on the radar about calendars, calendar programs, calendar servers, calendar services, and just about anything that has to do with calendars. Frank lists the attributes of a perfect calendar in reaction to Jeremy Zawodny’s post on the subject. They’re both spot on. The world is in desperate need for calendars that sync to and on multiple paltforms, allow easy sharing, public and private events, access anywhere, and interop nicely. To put it bluntly we really need a calendaring system that doesn’t suck.

There are a lot of calendars out there, many of them quite good. But when you get down to it they all suck in one regard or another. Some are paltform specific. Others work well as long as you stay within walls of their system. Others sync with half the platforms that you’d like but not the other half. Heck, I even hear that Hula is getting some people laid.

I’ve looked at a lot of different calendaring systems and would rather not laundry list them. Some have been very close to being ideal. I set up calendar sharing over WebDav with Sunbird after its first public release. I tried Hula the day it came out. I tried unsuccessfully to compile and install Open-Xchange. Webcalendar is a solid webapp written in PHP, but it’s lacking in sync.

Like I said, we’re at a tipping point. We could go over the edge if Google really is working on a rich-web UI calendaring system that rocks. I doubt that they would be able to work in the synchronization that I’d really kill to have, but you never know.

Until the killer calendar comes along and slaps me in the face, I’ll be trying each one that has promise in hopes that it’s “the one.”