The Calendar That Ate Time

Google just solved a problem you didn't know you had. Your time now lives on their server.

Today Mountain View unveiled Google Calendar, a free, web-based scheduling tool that syncs with your Gmail account and lets you view your day from any internet-connected computer. Product manager Carl Sjogreen's blog post frames it with the breathless simplicity that Google has perfected: click, type one line, done. Share calendars with friends. Get SMS reminders. Import your Outlook data. It's about time, the post says, apparently without irony.

And it is simple. Suspiciously simple.

Here's what Google actually shipped: a clean AJAX interface that makes 30 Boxes look like a science project and Yahoo Calendar look like it was designed by a committee that hates calendars. You type "dinner 6pm Friday" and it just works. You invite someone by entering their email. You browse public calendars — holidays, sports schedules, lunar phases if that's your thing. It supports the iCal standard, which means it plays nice with Apple's iCal and Sunbird. The sharing permissions are granular. The whole thing loads fast and stays out of your way.

Credit where it's due — they shipped something real. Mark your calendars. Or rather, mark Google's calendar. Because that's the part worth paying attention to.

Every calendar application before this lived on your machine. Your Outlook calendar sat on your hard drive. Your Palm Pilot synced through a cradle on your desk. Your wall calendar hung in your kitchen. The data was yours because the storage was yours. The architecture of your day existed in physical space you controlled.

Google Calendar moves that architecture to a data center in Oregon or Georgia or wherever they're building this week. Your Monday morning meeting, your dentist appointment, your kid's soccer game, your anniversary dinner — all of it now transits through Google's infrastructure. They're not charging you money. They're not even showing ads, yet. They're just asking you to let them hold the map of your time.

The pitch is convenience. And it is convenient. I've been using the beta for an hour and I can already feel the pull — the relief of not worrying about sync conflicts, the elegance of sharing a calendar by sending a link instead of emailing an .ics file. The product is genuinely good. That's what makes the pattern worth naming.

Because the pattern is infrastructure capture through convenience. Gmail did it with email — gave you a gigabyte of storage when everyone else offered 25 megabytes, and in exchange, your correspondence moved to Google's servers. Google Maps did it with directions — made MapQuest look prehistoric, and in exchange, your location queries became Google's data. Now Google Calendar does it with time itself.

Not time in the abstract philosophical sense. Time in the most practical sense possible: when you wake up, when you eat, when you work, when you're available, when you're not. The structure of your attention, rendered as blocks on a grid, stored on someone else's computer.

Sjogreen says the design philosophy is about helping people "get the most out of their time." Which is true in the way that all Google products are true — they solve the stated problem elegantly while quietly solving a different problem that benefits Google. The stated problem: scheduling is fragmented and hard. The quiet problem: Google doesn't yet know how you spend your hours.

Today it's a beta with a clean interface and nice SMS reminders. The tool serves you. You consult it when you choose to.

I'll start the timer on how long that relationship lasts.

Sources:

• It's about time — Google Blog, 2006-04-13
• Google Calendar — TIME, 2006-12-20