Google unveils calendar service

By Jefferson Graham, USA TODAY

Hoping to beef up the underperforming online calendar market, Internet search giant Google late Wednesday introduced a calendar service notable for easy-access sharing among friends and family.
Unlike popular online calendars from AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN, Google's calendar allows multiple people to layer information, so that Mom, Dad and the kids can all see their combined events on one page.

With AOL, Yahoo and MSN calendars, information can be e-mailed to family and friends, or posted online at a Web address, but not easily combined. Microsoft's Outlook, hugely popular with businesses, offers shared calendars, but companies must pay hefty server fees for the feature.

Google product manager Carl Sjogreen says the company added calendars to its arsenal of consumer services because Google users "wanted to see a new approach to calendars. Our mission is to organize the world's information, and one piece of information people care about a lot is what they're doing every day."

Google's calendar is ad-free, but the company hopes to profit by having users spend more time with Google, where they will see ads on other pages.

MSN and Yahoo calendars also are ad-free, while AOL's is ad-supported.

Allen Weiner, an analyst at research firm Gartner, says Google Calendar is "the first major calendar innovation in years. Google has created a very simple platform that allows a lot of user collaboration."

According to market tracker Nielsen/NetRatings, none of the three big free calendar Web programs have extremely high usage. AOL is first, with 2.9 million users in March, to Yahoo's 2.4 million and MSN's 1.3 million.

JupiterResearch analyst David Card says the online calendar programs don't get more traction because, "They're too hard to use. There are too many steps and clicks to make."

Google's challenge is "teaching consumers how to use the program and show them why their calendar is easy," he says.

Google's calendar is free and open to anyone with Internet Explorer or Firefox Web browser. Users need to sign up for a free Google account if they don't already have one.

People who have a Google Gmail e-mail account get an extra feature not normally found in calendar programs. If an e-mail suggests "meeting Wednesday at 9," or something similar, the information can be added to the calendar with one click from the e-mail program.

Gmail is still technically in "beta" test mode, but anyone can sign up by providing their cellphone number to Google.

New calendar events can be created with fewer steps than competing programs, and they can be dragged and dropped to new spots on the calendar.

While Google puts a new face on calendar programs, it lags behind Yahoo and AOL in allowing users to sync information to portable devices such as cellphones and personal digital assistants.

Google says it will add sync functionality in the coming months.