Calendars

Want to meet with me for lunch? You can go to Tungle.me/scobleizer and find an open spot in my schedule and schedule me. I’ll get an email and will be able to accept or reject the request or suggest another time. This is really a great new way to schedule meetings and saves me a TON of time. Tungle hooks into my Google Calendar and then puts the meeting on that, which gets synched to lots of other places including my calendars on my Android-based phones, my iPhone, my iPad, Microsoft Outlook, etc.

Plus they recently added hooks into Plancast, which is where I keep a list of the industry events I’m attending.

So when the team was in town recently I wanted to meet up with them to see what they were thinking about the future of calendaring and scheduling and whether they were thinking of even more links to other information sources like they did with Plancast. We met on the lawn inside Google’s headquarters, right in front of building 43, which I found was metaphorical.

Are you interested in saving time? You should try Tungle and you should watch the video.

There has been a lot of well deserved talk recently about the Facebook social graph. The social graph is very important because it helps establish the relationships between people and now between people and the world around them.

But the concept of the graph is much more important that the framework that Facebook has established. The concept of the graph is important because of what I call context. What we, as humans, really want is to be able to contextualize everything in our world. We define people by who they know, what they do, what they like, etc. But this concept of contexualizing goes much further. Every fact and every piece of information has a context.

Context is really nothing more than everything we know or can know about any given “thing” in the world. And any “thing” in the world can have a relationship to anything else. If you have a glass sitting on a table then the relationship between the glass and the table is “sitting on”. But they might also be related to a common person with the relationship “purchased by”.

If you think about our world, every object has an almost infinite amount of context, so if we went overboard with this it could quickly become uselessly broad. But there is an important middle ground here. It is critically important that we as individuals be able to capture the context that *we think* is important, and it is critically important that we be able to browse the context that those close to us think is important.

For example I may want to capture that a given person has a “married to” relationship to someone. For others that may or not be important. But I should be able to capture that. Its also important that I be able to explore all of the relationship that can be captured through the everyday software I use. Obviously lots of interesting relationships can be captured from email, calendars, documents, and I want to see *all* of those relationships when I need to.

The key to having useful context is being able to access it when you need it. For example, shouldnt you be able to see, whenever you look at a contact in your address book, all the emails you have received from that person, and when you have them in your calendar. For context, user interface is clearly is as important as storage and protocols.

Now its true that there are products that do small pieces of this for you like perhaps Xobni, or Gist. But my point is a larger one. What we really want is a system that provides context for *all* of the information objects that matter to us. This is not a niche problem. Existing tools are purpose built. They are finished recipes when what we really need are ingredients. I don't want any guard rails preventing me from capturing information and creating relationship between objects.

The point in all of this is that what we are constantly looking for is context. The social graph is just one relatively narrow facility for providing us that context. Part of the reason I am excited about this discussion around graphs and the emergence of graph databases is that I think we really need a universal platform for storing context. Facebook is but one use case of what is clearly a *much* larger opportunity.

There are still a lot of hidden details being revealed in Apple’s upcoming iPhone OS 4.0, and some of them might including deeper integration of Facebook. In particular, there seems to be evidence that Facebook events, contacts and possibly email will be handled at the iPhone User Accounts level.

Engadget dug through some some of the .plist code files from a jailbroken iPhone running OS 4.0 and found several supporting details including mention of “SocialKitInternal.framework,” which, as they mention, could allow other service integration. Facebook events could be integrated with Apple calendars, and there seems to be support for mail. Given that Facebook is working on its own real email client, Titan, it would also make sense for the iPhone OS to prep for that, though there is already enough Facebook user account data to warrant being integrated with Apple User Accounts, as Gunning For Safety says (yes, a nail gun safety blog).

What I’m really looking forward to is Apple’s social cover flow patent to be integrated with Facebook for browsing profiles. If OS 4.0 or an upcoming version of it supports the newly-granted social cover flow feature and it’s opened up to developers, then surely it’ll get integrated into Facebook and other social media apps on the iPhone. Thankfully, OS 4.0 for the iPhone and iPod Touch comes out this summer. iPad users will have to wait until fall.

Gmail's New Interface for Adding Event Invitations — Gmail is even more integrated with Google Calendar: when you compose a new message, you'll find a new interface for sending invitations. Click "Insert invitation" and Gmail opens a new dialog that lets you find the best time for your even by showing the events from your calendar and from the calendars of people you are inviting. You can also type the location of the event, a description and choose a calendar for the event.


After entering all the details, the event is added to the email message and you can still edit the event or remove it.


{ Thanks, Abhijeet. }

Posted by Oana Florescu, Software Engineer

Since my friends share their schedules with me in Google Calendar, when I want to see a movie with them, I can check to see which nights they're free before sending out an email about it. However, I need to switch between Gmail and Calendar in order to check their availability and send an email invitation.

Today, we're launching a new feature that brings tighter integration between Gmail and Calendar, making it easier to create Calendar events from within Gmail. When you compose an email message, there's now an "Insert: Invitation" link right under the subject line.


When you click it, a small window appears that displays your availability as well as that of the people you're emailing provided you have permission to see their calendars.


You can check your friends' availability and choose an appropriate time for the event you're setting up right from there. When you've settled on the details of the event, click the "Insert Invitation" button and a preview of the invitation will appear in your email message:


When you send the email, the event gets added to your calendar as well as to your friends' calendars.

Here’s a ray of product sunshine in an otherwise overcast MySpace world. Tonight they are launching a new MySpace events and calendar platform that integrates technology from MySpace Music, iLike, Social Plan and Facebook Connect (told you). It includes new tools for Artists to add concert events and allows users to add those events, share them, and even purchase tickets right from MySpace. It’s an elegant weaving of products that plays to a core strength of MySpace – music, and a huge database of event information – around 1 million concert events in 2010 alone. You can see the new MySpace Events page here.

It’s also a huge improvement from the existing event and calendaring apps on MySpace. Here’s what a concert event used to look like on MySpace:

Here’s what an event might look like now, after the new launch:

Users are also encouraged to share events with friends in the MySpace stream, on Facebook or on Twitter. And artists are being given new tools to actually create attractive concert listings. All of these events are aggregated into the users’ MySpace Calendars along with their normal calendar data.

In the coming months, says MySpace, they’ll add additional features around mobile access, concert notifications and movies and DVD releases and premiers.

Trumba Offers Custom Objects to Calendars —

Trumba, the shared calendar and events communications software company has added the ability for users to attach "custom objects" to their Web calendars and other websites. These "objects" are in essence tables that unfold graphically, keyed to links, or can stand on their own as pages.

Trumba's customers use the company's software to publish interlinked calendars and provide other modular features to their websites. Clients include media companies like the New York Times and Ottaway Newspapers, academic institutions like Kansas State and Emory Universities, and groups like the City of Seattle and the New Orleans Saints.

Sponsor

The custom objects advance the inherent modularity of Trumba's offerings. From Trumba:

"To quickly grasp the idea of an Object, think of it as a table. Each record is represented by a row. Each attribute is represented by a column. Because Objects are tables, you can use them to store any collection of data that you might want to publish on your website."

Dan Hickman, Trumba's president, wrote us:

"Some of our competitors offer a canned venue or performer features that let you track and publish that information along with your calendar but our custom objects feature lets you create any type of content that might be associated with your events. The feature can even be used to publish a connected database of information that's not even related to your calendar."

Examples include attaching venue descriptions and pictures to events, to provide detailed listings of departments in a sleekly retrievable fashion and the ability to solicit and utilize user-generated content.

Disclosure: The author helped Trumba start their first blog many years ago.

Discuss

Posterous, the integrated small blogging platform, announced the debut of one-stop custom domain registration today.

A new "domain purchasing feature" provides a one-click on-site way to avoid what Posterous' Vincent Chu called "the geeky details" of securing and applying a personal domain to your account.

Sponsor

"After you've purchased your own domain, we also make it super easy to set up your own personalized email boxes, calendars, and wikis using Google Apps."

Instead of mucking about in the guts of your personal branding engine, this push-button domain machine avers to do it all for you. A big deal? Just a deal of modest proportion, in keeping with the simplicity the service emphasizes.

Tumblr, Posterous' biggest competitor, also offers custom domains but not through its own site and not integrated with Google.

Discuss

If you love Posterous but want to use it with a customized domain name (like say, ChristinaWarren.com), it just got really, really simple. Posterous has just rolled out the ability to register your own domain name for your Posterous blog and get it set up correctly in one step.

Posterous has offered support for custom domains for some time now, but it still required the user registering a domain with a registrar and then altering their A records with the registrar to point to Posterous.

Like WordPress.com, Posterous users can now avoid that step. You can check the availability of your desired domain name and if it’s not taken, register it and have it automatically mapped to your account in one step.

Furthermore, you can set up Google Apps for your domain (so you can have email, calendars and access to all of the Google Apps Marketplace stuff) really quickly. This is pretty useful, because while some registrars will let you set up Google Apps alongside your domain, this will take care of that extra step of also hooking it up to Posterous.

Posterous says that for the first month, the price of domain registration through them will be discounted. Currently, you can register a domain for $24.99 for one year or $19.99 per year if you register for two years. The normal registration prices weren’t revealed. You can only register .com, .net or .org domains through Posterous.

Although it’s easy to get a domain name for under $10 a year, the fact that you can get automatic mapping to Posterous and easy set-up with Google Apps definitely makes this a good value for users who aren’t interested in dealing with domain registrars.

Tags: blogging, blogging tools, domain name, domain registration, google apps, posterous

This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label "Google Apps highlights" and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

We've been busy over the last couple weeks launching updates to make Google Apps more useful, whether you use Google Apps at work, at school or at home.

Smart Rescheduler Lab in Google Calendar
If you’ve ever tried to schedule time with a group of people who have packed agendas, you know how hard it can be to find a good meeting time that works for everyone. With the Smart Rescheduler, Google Calendar can sift through the details for you. When you need to reschedule an appointment, Smart Rescheduler quickly compares people’s calendars and ranks potential meeting times based on criteria like attendees, schedule complexity, conference rooms, and time zones. You can enable Smart Rescheduler by going to “Labs” under “Settings” in Google Calendar.


Suspicious account activity alerts
To help keep Gmail users and the data in their accounts safer, on Wednesday we launched a new security feature to alert you if our systems detect suspicious activity in your account. When something unusual is identified, you’ll see a warning notification near the top of your inbox. You can choose to view a log of recent activity, and if it looks like your account has been compromised, you can change your password immediately. (And while we’re on the topic of security, we encourage you to brush up on our tips to keep your account safer.) We know that security is also a top priority for businesses and schools, and we plan to bring this feature to Google Apps customers once we have gathered and incorporated their feedback.


Contact delegation
Businesses using Google Apps can use a feature called email delegation, which lets employees appoint delegates who are allowed to read, send and manage email on their behalf. For example, this allows executive assistants to handle email for their managers. As of last Monday, delegates can also access and manage contacts. Now, a delegate can pick contacts from the manager’s contact list when composing a message on behalf of the manager, and keep the manager’s contacts up-to-date.

Google Apps Migration for Microsoft® Exchange
Millions of companies and schools have switched to Google Apps, and we hope to help millions more “go Google” in the near future. To make the transition as smooth as possible, we’ve released Google Apps Migration for Microsoft® Exchange, a server-to-server migration utility that brings email, contacts and calendar data from a legacy Microsoft® Exchange system to Google Apps. This makes the transition more seamless for employees, faculty and students. When they sign in to Google Apps, they’ll see the messages, contact information and calendar appointments from the old system right in Gmail and Google Calendar.

Who’s gone Google?
The number of businesses and other organizations using Google Apps continues to shoot up, and we hit another big milestone by crossing the 25 million user mark. Among those are the 7,000 employees at Konica Minolta, who are using Google Apps to help the company move fast and be more productive.

We’re excited to welcome another string of schools and universities too, including the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and the College of William and Mary. Marshall University has a particularly great story: their technology group challenged themselves to deploy Google Apps to over 50,000 students in less than 24 hours – quite a feat when it typically takes large organizations months or even years to make major technology changes. We hope Marshall’s nimble approach inspires others to make the switch!

I hope you're enjoying the latest round of new features, whether you're using Google Apps with friends and family, with colleagues or with classmates. And don’t forget, you can always check the Google Apps Blog for more details and the latest news in this area.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

Google Calendar Has a Smart Rescheduler & It Is Great —

I am one of those people who has a tough time trying to schedule meetings. What’s worse is that times change, mostly because of the ever-shifting deadlines that come with blogging. That is one of the main reasons my calendar constantly descends into chaos. I turned to professional help, but if you are both like me and are a Google Calendar user, scheduling help could now be as simple as turning on a feature inside Google Calendar. The new gadget, available in Google Calendar Labs, is called Smart Scheduler.

Once turned on, you can select an event and click “Find a new time.” David Marmaros, creator of the gadget, writes on the Gmail Blog:

[W]e decided to apply some of Google’s search experience to the problem of scheduling. We experimented with using ranking algorithms to return the most relevant meeting times based on specified criteria like attendees, schedule complexity, conference rooms, and time zones. Just like Google search ranks the web, our scheduling search algorithm returns a ranked set of the best candidate dates and times. [...] You’ll see ranked list of possible times for your meeting. By investigating the calendars others have shared with you, Google Calendar can make some educated guesses about how easy it might be to reschedule a conflicting meeting and even find you a replacement conference room nearby. This process is 100% automated [...]

I just tried it out, rescheduled a meeting, and yes: it works as advertised. For once I am not going to complain about a Google product. :-)

Scheduling meetings is tough, but rescheduling is even harder. We all know how frustrating it can be to try to find just the right time that accommodates everyone's availability and preferred working hours. Throw in different time zones and conference rooms and it goes from painful to excruciating. We'd rather schedule dental appointments.

On the Google Calendar team, we've noticed that when people talk about scheduling they say things like "I'm trying to find a time" or "let's search for a new date." We wondered what would happen if we treated calendaring more like a search problem. Just as Google search applies ranking algorithms to return the most relevant results from the web, we hoped we could rank meeting times based on criteria important to the person scheduling the meeting.


Today we're launching the result of that experiment, a gadget called Smart Rescheduler, in Google Calendar Labs. Once you enable the Lab, you can find a new time for an event simply by clicking on a link. Our schedule search algorithm will return a ranked set of the best candidate dates and times based on the calendars others have shared with you. You can read more about it on the Gmail Blog.

So next time your boss says "We need to reschedule," just smile and say "I'm feeling lucky."

Posted by Ken Norton, Product Manager

Posted by David Marmaros, Software Engineer

As you can imagine, those of us on the Google Calendar team spend a lot of time thinking about scheduling. We regularly talk to people who schedule and reschedule a lot of meetings: administrative assistants. Talking to them, we understand just how much time they spend looking at schedules, investigating other people's calendars, finding replacement conference rooms and rescheduling conflicts. And then some manager's travel plans change and everything starts over again.

If you're searching for something on the web, you don't just start randomly visiting pages looking for relevant content, you use a search engine. So we decided to apply some of Google's search experience to the problem of scheduling. We experimented with using ranking algorithms to return the most relevant meeting times based on specified criteria like attendees, schedule complexity, conference rooms, and time zones. Just like Google search ranks the web, our scheduling search algorithm returns a ranked set of the best candidate dates and times.

Today we're launching the result of that experiment, a gadget called Smart Rescheduler, in Google Calendar Labs. Once you turn it on, just select an event you'd like to reschedule, then click "Find a new time...":

You'll see ranked list of possible times for your meeting. By investigating the calendars others have shared with you, Google Calendar can make some educated guesses about how easy it might be to reschedule a conflicting meeting and even find you a replacement conference room nearby. This process is 100% automated — no Google employees are doing any work behind the scenes. You can refine the results by marking people as optional, changing the meeting duration, ignoring certain conflicts, or specifying the earliest and latest times you'll accept. The results will immediately update to reflect your new requirements.


This feature is still experimental, so we'd love your ideas and feedback. Of course, we can't make meetings more interesting, but we can try to save you frustration leading up to them.

The only thing worse than company meetings is trying to schedule one. The more people who need to be at that meeting, the harder it is to find a time slot that works with everyone’s schedule. A new Google Calendar Labs feature called the Smart Rescheduler brings some search smarts to the problem. “Overnight, all the Google apps customers will get this,” says Google Calendar product manager Cyrus Mistry. “It is like we are giving every employee their own administrative assistant.”

The person scheduling the meeting enters the names of the participants, how long the meeting will be, and a date by when the meeting must take place. The Smart Rescheduler then goes out and looks at everyone’s calendar to see when everyone is free, taking into account different time zones and other commitments on their calendars (in order for this to work, all the meeting attendees must share their calendars with Google Calendar).

All too often at this point in the process, someone has a conflict. What the Rescheduler does is look at all the soft constraints and actually ranks the best meeting times. Different attendees can be prioritized so the meeting is set around their schedule. Soft constraints are taken into account like partial schedule overlaps, times blocked with no other attendees, meetings where someone’s been invited but hasn’t yet accepted, or meetings organized by that person. These factors often indicate a schedule that can be altered.

Google Calendar throws all of these factors together and comes up with a ranking for the best possible meeting time. “We did look at algorithms for search to see how they solved which doc should come to the top,” says Mistry. “We discover what meeting should come out on top.” The Rescheduler can even book new conference rooms based on which one is closest to the original one and the same size.

Just like you buy “applications” from the iTunes store and add them to your iPhone, everyone can now buy readymade “cloud applications” from the Google Apps Marketplace and install them to their Google Apps’ accounts.

Google Apps Marketplace, like the iTunes store, includes a mix of free and paid web applications but there’s one difference – you only pay once for installing an iPhone app but Google Applications are generally subscription based so you pay as you use.

You can explore the Google Apps market at google.com/appsmarketplace. Then watch the video to know how you can easily add “apps” to your own Google Apps account.

Is the Google Apps Marketplace only for Businesses?

If you read the official announcements and the press releases from Google, you’ll get an impression that the Apps Marketplace is primarily for businesses and large companies who have shifted to Google Apps.

That’s true but the Google Apps Marketplace is equally appealing to individuals like you and me who are not businesses but simply use the Standard Edition (free version) of Google Apps to manage their web domains, emails and calendars online.

Let me explain. When you add an application to your Google Apps account (say your install Aviary for editing photos), you can quickly access that app from any other Google service (like Gmail or Google Docs) through the drop-down menu in the Google Bar (see screenshot).

The big advantage here is that when you switch to an app from the Google menu, you can start using that app directly without having to log-in.

If you are logged into one Google service, you are automatically logged into all the other Google Applications that are attached to your Google Apps account. This can be such a time-saver.

The Best Web Applications for your Google Apps

Here are some useful applications from the Google Apps Marketplace that have a free version and you can consider them installing to your Google Apps account.

1. ManyMoon – This is an online project management software that is free and will integrate with Google Calendar as well as your Google Docs storage -- see review of ManyMoon.

2. Aviary – This like adding a stripped version of Photoshop to your Google Apps. With Aviary, you can not only created and edit photos online but the app also has an audio editor for recording / editing podcasts and music. Aviary will save your file into a designated Google Docs folder.

3. Offisync – With Offisync, you can edit Google Documents right inside your Microsoft Office programs. It can also save documents from the desktop to your online account right within Office – see review of Offisync.

4. Zoho Projects – This is a more mature web-based project management app for Google Apps that also includes a wiki. Its a premium app but you can create one project for free – see more project management apps.

5. Google Short Links – If you don’t want to use bit.ly or tinyurl.com for shortening URLs, use the Short Links app from Google. It lets you setup your own redirection service on your personal Google Apps domain.

6. Spanning Backup – If you ever wish to backup your Google data (like documents, calendar and contacts) to the cloud, this app will come handy.

7. Time Report – This will add timesheet related features to Google Calendar so you track the time spent on various activities.

8. SlideRocket – Not happy with the presentations module of Google Docs? Try SlideRocket, this is one of the best online presentation apps on the Internet today.

9. Mail Chimp – Gmail has a strict daily sending limit so if you want to send bulk emails from Gmail account, use MailChimp – the service is free for lists up to 500 emails.

10. Survey Monkey – You can use the build-in Google Docs for Surveys but it you want something more personalized and customizable, try Survey Monkey – the basic version is free.

Finally, I’ll leave you with this creative video from Box.net that demonstrates how their service integrates with Google Apps.

The Best Applications for your Google Apps

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

     

Google takes a lot of heat when one of its applications, especially Gmail, goes down — in fact, last September’s Gmail outage caused some collateral damage, as Twitter struggled under the load of the users flooding to the microblogging site to complain. Justifiably or not, those outages probably make some businesses wary of Google Apps as they wonder whether storing their email, documents, and calendars on Google’s data centers is a little risky. But Senior Product Manager Rajen Sheth just published a blog post laying out the case that Google Apps are actually the best place to store your company’s data.

Now, the basic argument about why it’s actually safer to store data in Google’s data center, rather than on your own machines, is a familiar one. But Sheth’s post highlights a specific feature — the fact that Google performs “synchronous replication” on everything in Apps. In other words, whenever you send an email or change a document, Google writes that information to two different data centers at once. So if there are any data center has problems, Google should be able to switch you over to another one with minimum downtime and data loss. Sheth writes:

Some companies have adopted synchronous replication as well, but it is even more expensive than everything else we’ve mentioned. To backup 25GB of data with synchronous replication a business may easily pay from $150 to $500+ in storage and maintenance costs- and that’s per employee. That doesn’t even include the cost of the applications. The exact price depends on a number of factors such as the number of times the data is replicated and the choice of service provider. At the low end a company might tier the number of times they replicate data, and at the high end they’ll make several copies of the data for everyone. We also replicate all the data multiple times, and the 25GB per employee for Gmail is backed up for free. Plus you get even more disk space for storage-intensive applications like Google Docs, Google Sites and Google Video for business. Other companies may offer cloud computing solutions as well, but don’t assume they backup your data in more than one data center.

Google’s advantage, Sheth says, is the fact that it runs many data centers and has fast connections between them. The goal is that users should never know when a data center is down, because they’ll be switched over seamlessly and instantly. As evidenced by the occasional outages, Google isn’t quite there yet, but Sheth told me, “We’ve made a variety of enhancements in the systems to make them more and more resilient. You can expect that that’s going to be an ongoing thing over time. No system is perfect, but we want to be as close to perfect as we absolutely can be.”

These efforts aren’t a new initiative, and Sheth said they were key to winning over some of Google’s big customers, such as the City of Los Angeles. But smaller companies weren’t necessarily aware of them — hence today’s push to bring give Google’s reliable side a little more attention.

Companies: Google

People: Rajen Sheth

When you're trying to set up a meeting with someone who's as busy as you, it's tempting to just flop open your datebook and say "pick a time when I'm free." MeetWith.Me lets you do that while keeping your appointment details private.

This free web service hooks into your online or computer-based calendar and constructs a calendar that denotes what times of day you're busy without saying why. Registration is fast and requires only an email address for verification. Once your account is set up, MeetWtihMe connects with one of several different calendars including Outlook, iCal, Google Calendar, and Yahoo.

MeetWith.Me assigns you your very own link that displays a public calendar detailing what blocks of time you have free and available. As you update your personal calendar, MeetWith.Me automatically updates your public page as well.

If you want to be proactive in setting up a meeting, the service also allows you to email to your co-workers a list of up to the five best dates and times that work for you so they can schedule accordingly. Respondents don't need to sign up to answer, and MeetWitihMe automatically tracks responses and lets you send reminders to anyone who hasn't replied.

We've highlighted other solid meeting schedulers, like previously mentioned Doodle and TimeToMeet, but MeetWith.Me tickles our fancy for its drop-dead simplicity and the fact that respondents don't need to sign up for anything to see when you're busy. Got a favorite tool for scheduling your meetings? Let us know in the comments.

More than 3.5 million events are created each month on Facebook, and the average Facebook user is invited to 3 of them per month. So if you’re one of the millions who uses Facebook Events to share your plans, or Facebook Birthdays to keep track of friends birthdays, then you should check out fbCal.

Built by calendar aggregation company Mixin, the free service lets you automatically synchronize this Facebook information to a variety of other calendar services, including Google Calendar, Apple’s iCal (including directly in the iPhone), Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Sunbird, and Lotus Notes.

Once you complete the syncing process, you’ll be able to see calendar entries for events and birthdays from Facebook within any of these programs.

Facebook itself lets you subscribe to individual events, which is a good option if you want to only add individual events. It has previously also let you do a bulk export of events so you can track upcoming ones automatically, albeit not with granular features that fbcal offers. However, while the bulk exporter option is still available for use by developers on the platform, and live for people who have previously set it up, it is no longer visible on the Events page. It used to be, but seems to have disappeared with the redesign earlier this month (we have an email in to Facebook about that and we’ll update when we hear back).

Instructions obviously vary for each program, and the company details them here. There are a few options to note for the calendar entires. You can choose to subscribe to various types of event statuses you’ve previously marked in Facebook, from “Attending” at the minimum to “Attending, Maybe attending, Not attending, Awaiting Reply” at the maximum. You can also subscribe to your Facebook calendar entries by RSS, if you prefer using Google Reader or another reader. Or you can download your existing entries directly — the problem with that option is that you won’t get the automatic updates from Facebook. FbCal provides the calendar in the iCalendar format (.ics), which is also used by other calendar applications beyond the ones we list here. Finally, among general features, you can set the time zone so the events match your calendar.

The birthday feature can also be useful, although it is a bit noisy if you have a lot of Facebook friends — a good addition would be a way to select the Facebook friends whose birthdays you want to remember.

We tried the service out with Apple’s iCal, and it worked very well. Click on the iCal logo for Events and the iCal desktop app loads, and asks you to subscribe to the Events calendar you’ve selected. Hit Subscribe and you’ll create a new Facebook Calendar (you can then choose a color, and other iCal options), then you’ll see your Facebook items auto-populated.

Fox has been slow to show its hand concerning the Avatar home video release schedule, but that didn't stop director James Cameron from spilling assorted dates and SKUs in a Wall Street Journal interview. He's pegged a standard DVD & Blu-ray release for April 22, with a special edition DVD and Blu-ray 3D version arriving in November. Considering how much electronics companies have invested in bringing 3D to market this year and specifically Panasonic's push to make Avatar a box office smash the timing seems right on target. Whether you love the Na'Vi just a little or far, far too much, budgeting for a 3D related Black Friday upgrade to go along with blue body paint for Halloween is seeming like a more sensible option every day.

James Cameron sees Avatar on Blu-ray 3D in November, HDTV manufacturers mark their calendars originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Feb 2010 21:34:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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