Scoble’s Link Blog

There is a lot of chatter out there about an upcoming Google Calendar release.  Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo! lists some of the things he would like to see Google do if they were to release an online calendar.  Lots of good suggestions after the jump, both in his post and in the comments.

For those of you who don’t know, I have logged a fair amount of time in the online calendar/scheduling space.  I was a co-founder (along with Bill Trenchard and Andre Black) and VP of Products at Jump.com in the late 90’s after graduating from Cornell.  Jump.com was acquired by Microsoft in 1999 and has since been integrated into MSN Hotmail at calendar.msn.com.

Some time after Jump.com, I helped steer product development at a startup company in Los Angeles; Handshake.com/SimplyDone.com (now deceased).  At the time (Y2k) I was beginning to wonder if I would ever work on anything other than time zones, recurrence rules, and "new appointment" dialogs.  Thankfully, I eventually did.

But Jump.com was an absolute marvel for its day, and did a bunch of things that online calendars still don’t do (including MSN Calendar!).  Some of the features (MSN does have some of these): Calendar sharing, Weather/TV/Sports feed integration, group calendars, contact "linking", Outlook and PDA synchronization, and a host of other cool things - in a BETA, no less.  Built by college kids.  Making just enough money to buy pizza on Fridays.

The vision at Jump was to bring online calendars "to the masses" - make them friendly, easy-to-use, but most importantly social!  There really are two kind of calendar users - the user who tracks everything in their day down to the minute (me) and the user who posts a sticky note onto a shared wall calendar.  Jump.com was really designed to adapt to both of those users - the hardcore calendar junkie as well as the user who only had nine appointments every month but is still interested in tracking when the next episode of their favorite TV show is going to air.  The sharing features made it possible to have a family calendar or to share your own personal calendar with your spouse; making it easy to schedule that next trip to IKEA.  Overall, it was an incredibly impressive system for its time.

It will be interesting to see what advancements are made in the upcoming days in the calendar space.  If the rumors are true about Google, expect to see an XMLHTTP-based calendar that is lightening fast, useful, but not integrated into Gmail or Orkut   Seriously, I think having Google enter this space would be incredibly exciting - as an emerging technology company, they are great… and there is nothing better than someone stepping in to do things a little differently.  There is a lot of potential opportunity here if you step out of the traditional Outlook-style model and think about calendars as a social dashboard.  Don’t you think?

So, here we are… six years have passed and online calendars are the "next big thing" again… Crazy how things come full circle.  Here is a nostalgic screenshot of Jump.com for your viewing pleasure.