… I mean Flickr/Upcoming/Delicious. In particular, I mean that brief moment of optimism in the Spring of ’06, on the roof of the Iron Cactus, at the Spread the FUD party, when it looked like Yahoo! had a wedge and the will to solve the social search problem, and magically, I might even get to be a part of that. I said in my cover letter (in silly flowery, cover letter speak)

“The next round of innovation will be about building connections. The explosion of voices, information and ideas is currently outpacing our techniques for coping with them. We need to be helping people and communities find new ways to connect, interact, and work together to make sense of this accelerating decentralization. Innovation has been blossoming at the edges of the Net since the beginning, but innovation is also moving back to the connecting nodes, like Yahoo.”

Which is much on my mind when I hear about Marissa demo’ing social search yesterday.

And I’m deeply puzzled (and not a little disappointed) that anyone would care if Bing or Google can search the public status timelines, if it doesn’t come with social context.

Now the question is can Goog shake their historied failure at all things social.

Photo from Jan Brašna

http://randomfoo.net/blog/id/4171

http://upcoming.org/news/archives/2006/09/18/upcoming/

http://upcoming.org/metro/us/ca/sf?date=9%2F29%2F2006

http://upcoming.org/news/archives/2006/08/28/undiscov/

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.

http://randomfoo.net/blog/id/4081

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)

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.

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.

• 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.

http://george.hotelling.net/90percent/geekery/upcomingorg_to_ical.php

Cool!

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

Jon is right, the state of calendaring standards is a fiasco. There are a couple of reasons for that. I think the two key factors have been:

• the CALSCH working group, like many people, tried to solve the scheduling problem, with business use as the target use case, versus just building some basic calendar building blocks. Despite this focus iCalendar still works pretty well as a basic building block. However the 7 years since it was released have fundamentally changed the landscape (like the standardization on XML), changes CALSCH hasn’t been able to keep up with or respond to.
• Microsoft. Aren’t they always the problem? A huge amount of time, energy, effort and tears has been spent trying to build a calendar tools that work with Outlook, and Exchange. Its a nightmare, even when MS supports standards, they do it brokenly, and the Outlook/Exchange combo has been specifically engineered to look out alternatives. Anyone who navigates the treacherous waters of MAPI, and Outlook’s various modes feel entitled to be paid for their efforts, and rightly so.

Apple, a Hope Which Fell Short

Apple really did a great job of reviving interesting in the iCalendar spec, and calendaring, and calendaring standards in general. They combined a pretty interface with a modern implementation of the standard, and a good enough, worse is better network protocol that worked over HTTP, and integrated with the Web, and web services.

However, they pulled up short. Where they could have pushed forward and set a quick and dirty standard for calendar sharing over HTTP that bypassed the byzantine, perpetually under construction CAP, they failed to implement a real, two way, pub-sub protocol. Presumably to drive people to use their .Mac premium service, and iSync application. Disappointing really, a very understandable, uninspired, profit driven decision. I’m sure Microsoft would be proud.

Ray’s Questions

Ray asked a few questions in post, probably rhetorical, and designed to draw attention to the daunting absence of good work being done in this field. However I’ll take a stab at answersing them. (oh, looks like Libby answered them as well)

• Has a method to embed iCal into XML ever been approved or agreed upon? If so, let me refer to it as xCal.

  Yes, xCal existed in draft form. Calsch decided to let it die, according to Doug Royer, “because there is no reason to have 2 standards for the same thing.” I’m inclined to also point to an certain hostility towards things web, and XML that I’ve seen over the years on the Calsch mailing list. There was even a parser for it, for a while.

• Has a method to embed xCal events/etc ever been suggested as a viable item type for RSS?

  The mod_event module was proposed in May, 2001, and is a simple, straightforward syntax for marking up an RSS feed to indicate event information. Many peoples’ reaction to seeing mod_event is to start trying to lard in the iCal syntax. I think this misses the point of an RSS event feed, a need which, in conjunction with other RSS modules, the mod_event serves very well.

• Has anyone built websites that publish venues’ event calendars in such a format for subscription/aggregation?

  Protest.net does, and has for quite a while. I know a handful of other projects that are in prototype or various stages of completion.

• Has anyone built an Outlook or Notes adapter that publishes personal or team calendars to such a feed, OR
• Has anyone built an RSS aggregator that can aggregate multiple calendar RSS feeds into a desktop or web calendar UI?

  Not that I know of. But remind me to get back to the question of web calendar UIs.

  Magpie does include basic support for mod_event, and I’ve built a couple of scripts using XML::RSS and DateTime::Format::W3CDTF.

• Has anyone built an RSS aggregator that can aggregate multiple calendar RSS feeds into your Outlook or Notes personal calendar?

  See my earlier point about Microsoft being one of the two key factors behind the calendar fiasco.

There Are Other Hammers

That said, I don’t think RSS is a particularly natural fit as transport for all calendaring and scheduling information. As Jon said, “Stop punishing RSS for its success”. RSS, and an RSS event feed works wonderfully well for public event calendars, and as a notification feed. It does not, and will not, map well to representing someone’s personal calendar in all its, repeating, complex, conditional, glory.

A Brief Note on Web UIs for Calendars

Next Steps?

Event Auto-discovery