Laughing Meme

I’ve been having a ton of fun playing with this. See Andy’s writeup for more details. Fun tinged with sadness that another of my favorite people is moving away. Good work Gordon, and good luck!

Aaron’s released upcalendar, the latest barrage in his Web2.0 on S60 campaign.

And 30Boxes has m.boxes.com.

Got to say the mobile page for OSCAL (now defunct as its smart enough to only show upcoming events), was by far my favorite part of the app.

Turns out mobile is sexy, useful, and fun but not all that hard. Who knew?

All of which goes back to my an idea I’ve been kicking around for a bit, sync is dead (which is good because sync is hard), instead we’ve got remote services, local caching, and change propagation. (which is largely understood) All the interesting work right now is on the tension between the client and the server.

One thing you notice showing up to these parties is you see the same (lovely) faces over and over. Figured it should be possible to take that knowledge of who is in the scene to mine the event sites for the “Social Web”, all those nifty Webbish events happening all over. (native to a Web of parties?)

Turns out there is a nearly 1 to 1 correlation with Upcoming Popular except where Upcoming Popular is better. Yet more proof that index funds beat managed funds every time.

Ah well, it would have been nifty. (and might still work for a different scene)

Congrats to Andy, Gordon, and Leonard, and about damn time. I first saw Upcoming almost exactly two years ago and thought “Wow, now that is how to do calendaring.” (and apparently I was jealous even back then!) Good luck!

Now we can all speculate on what calendar.google.com will be, but I’m thinking this round might be going to Yahoo.

update: And dear god, where I can get some of whatever Gordon is on, Upcoming and Ning!?!? No kidding “bred for skill in magic.”

update2: Flickr, Upcoming, and Ning, all built on PHP.

Calendaring on the web is starting to show signs of reawakening from death like sleep.

CalDAV seems to be fulfilling my early hopes for it; creating the first real movement on calendaring standards in years. CalDAV recently had a successful coming out at the CalCONNECT vendor event demoing implementations from Mozilla (Sunbird), Novell (Evolution), and Oracle. Neither Microsoft nor Apple deigned to attend.

Hula, the Novell backed open source groupware for the web project is generating considerable buzz with its high profile, if back handed, endorsement from JWZ, good track records of tech leads, and a wiki with all the right talking points.

Folks at U.C. Berkeley are doing good thinking on public event calendars as distinct from office scheduling aids as is evnt, a London skunkworks exploring the intersection of time, space, and open info.

Google is fueling speculation with rumors of a build vs. buy argument taking place behind the doors of Mountain View.

While Trumba has an everything old is new again feel, powerfully reminding me of golden age players in the space like When.com and Anyday. (and events calendars for local radio was a major MetaEvents plank)

Trumba and evnt both seem to have caught the wave that I credit Upcoming for pushing into the mainstream, namely that slavishly translating a wall calendar layout to web is misguided at best.

School Bell, an organizational calendar initially targeting schools just relaunched now built on Zope 3, and is looking very promising. (I’ll be ready for that demo real soon Tom)

While the activist community in NYC has a renewed push for a community wide events portal.

All very exciting. Hopefully this time around we’ll have learned the lessons of integration and syndication, ending up with productive engines that can integrate with our increasingly busy, decentralized, adhoc lives.

Starting to collect a list of RSS feeds for Boston (similar to a set I put together for Seattle, but never published)

• http://del.icio.us/tag/boston of course.
• also Upcoming.org: Boston

Ideally I’d like to find a resource like Scott’s Seattle Book Events calendar, might have to make that one.

idly.org: With a lot of help from Magpie RSS, I have whipped up a personal listing page of events from Upcoming.org.

Cool!

After all parsing event bearing RSS is what Magpie was original written for (even if they aren’t using Magpie’s W3CDTF parsing)