The title is something of a joke. When I sent out this email last November, as it was becoming clear that Anyday was going to be shut down, it was to friends all of whom were working in companies that had a business plan for online calendaring. The idea was a simple one, (and very un-dotcom) make an online calendar/pim service that provided quality for money, using a simple, and viable mini-payments (like mirco-payments, but bigger).
I was reminded of it recently when researching
fastmail.fm, whom I think has done a great job
implementing this exact same business plan, but for email. Keep prices low, allow
people to upgrade for a small, and well disclosed fee, grow slowly and stably on
the back of income so you’re around for the long haul, and provide what people
are asking for. I was also reminded of it by my partner just recently started working as an office
manager at a university and said, “I finally understand why Anyday was cool.” 7
months after Palm shut it down unfortunately.
Anyday was a web-based PIM, inspired by the Palm pilot, and built largely by
ex-Lotus people (and a few of us with different calendar backgrounds). The primary goal was to get a
functional online PIM that could sync with your desktop PIM, and Palm pilot,
for the purposes of remote access, backup, or act simply as a stand alone product.
Once people were online, there was the opportunity to use that connectivity to
do things impossible with the traditional applications, scheduling, free/busy
lookup, delegation, etc.
A while back I noticed that the Horde had almost all the components neccessary to satisfy that primary goal. And I was tempted to see if it could be used to
build an Anyday clone, just to see how fast it could be done, and how irrelevant
all of us overpaid Java programmers were. Once Anyday was gone the idea
evolved.
Horde provides: an addressbook with an LDAP backend, webmail with an IMAP
backend, a web calendar, and hooks for integrating them. So it would be real
simple to throw up something like Anyday, minus groups, scheduling, and sync.
Sync
Sync was always the coolest idea, and the hardest, most expensive problem
at Anyday. Funny thing is it doesn’t seem like it should need to be that
hard. I think part of the problem was in the conception.
They(we) bought into a solution (Extended Connect), that said “All things
must go through me.” Obviously
Extended liked this because it made then
more valuable.
But Sync’ing with the Palm could be really simple. I think a little desktop
client, that can talk XML-RPC to the server, used pilot-link to the Palm,
and parsed SyncML, would do the trick nicely. And if it was properly open and
interesting, would take off as its own open source project.
(update: not sure now iSync, and OS X fit on the landscape since this was written, might function as an open source alternative to iSync)
Self-Sustaining
Here is where I think the most intersting parts come in. I’m inspired by
Yahoo’s “sort-of-mirco-payments” at mail.yahoo.com, where you get 6M free,
and then you get another chunk for $2/month
The basic service would be free. And then you pay for extras.
Extras would include
- Direct access to the LDAP server behind the addressbook for sync’ing to
Outlook, Evolution and such.
- Direct access to the IMAP server again for access from Outlook, Evolution
and kin.
- More disk space, not sure if this is just for email, or total.
(update: I notice that diskspace isn’t fastmail.fm’s primary concern, but bandwidth, that makes sense, the collorary to the trusim “storage is cheap” is “bandwidth isn’t”)
CAP access when CAP becomes more exciting. Reefknot is almost ready! (update: Well Reefknot seems to have slowed down, but iCal.app, Entourage, Evolution,
and Outlook are all becoming serious iCalendar players)
You would want an account page, that summarizes all expenses, and makes
people feel very aware of how much they are spending. I think part of
what scares people about mirco-payents is feeling out of control.
Another trick would be to only bill when the amount owed gets large enough
to make it worth it. And to be clear about this. (sort of the reverse of what Amazon does for affiliate accounts)
(update: And to send a nice email about it the way Safari does)
I think the billing system would be the most complicated piece of
development. Probably 2 weeks work. (+2-3 weeks to debug 
(update: I’ve sinced learn I badly underestimate the time things take these days)
Further Development
I think Groups is an important concept to really make a service like this
useful. Both formal groups, and ad-hoc ones. And of course I would like
to expand the ideas of group scheduling that I was playing with before But
I don’t think they’re critical for initial acceptance.
update: Since I originally came up with this idea, iCal has been annouced which makes
some noise about the potentials for sharing calendar information, and syncing.
It will be interesting to see (in a couple of weeks now) what they’ve come up
with.
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