InfoQube IM - Community

Submitted by Armando on 2010/08/27 23:50

This website's content summarizes well where calendars are going. calendarofthefuture.com/

Not that new, but a nice reminder.

What strikes me as important :

1- Web interconnection : calendar can be connected to various sources of info so that it gets extra details about your various activities directly from the web, etc.

2- Data sharing : share your meetings, what you do etc. with your friends, etc. (Google like, Facebook like, etc.)

3- Calendar as a means to analyse how time is spent in order to balance up life activities and make better choices.

I think IQ could do all that eventuallyt. #1 with the HTML pane and some intelligent web fetching, #2 with google's help, #3... Well, IQ is perfect for #3 : pivots, graphs, etc.

That said, tungle.me is installed on my computer but I don't really use it... Anyway, I think it's good to be aware of where it's all going.

Comments

[quote=from www.tungle.me/Home/blog/the-calendar-of-the-future-%E2%80%93-a-manifesto/]

The Calendar of the Future – A Manifesto

Today’s calendar is broken. It’s a static repository of events. It’s a snapshot, a moment in time. Contrast that against our dynamic and ever changing lives and we have a significant disconnect. The model doesn’t work – it isn’t representative. It doesn’t leverage our digital footprints and create incremental value. Today’s calendar application is outdated, and with that we have an opportunity to innovate. If we compare the leaders in the digital calendar space, we see very similar feature function developed to date. If we remove brand and unique UI elements, we are left with complete product parity. We believe it’s time to rethink the calendar. It’s now time for the calendar of the future.

Let’s back up a bit…The Egyptians were the first to work out a calendar formula for measurement of the solar year, based on the position of the Sun. This formula was eventually adopted by the Romans and was the forerunner to the modern calendar. Other then the transition from analog to digital calendaring, we have seen little change in both the features and functions of the calendar, but also in the way we manipulate calendar data to help better serve our daily personal and professional lives. This is not an exercise in developing a new set of features for our online calendars. This is a tear down and rebuild. Let’s rethink the calendar. Let’s rethink the tools that help us manage our time. Let’s start from the ground up and build an application that fits our evolving, dynamic, nomadic, connected lives.

We live in a world of ubiquitous access. People today can get online from a number of devices – their laptop or desktop, their mobile devices and their tablets. We are a hyper connected society sharing information about ourselves, our locations and our plans. We publish to multiple platforms and we engage with multiple networks and communities. We play with social applications, location based services and we exist through multiple profiles. The more technology enables us to do, the more we expect it to do for us. Now that we’re no longer tied to desktop devices, the floodgates have opened for geo-location and on-the-go social networking. The result is an environment ripe with opportunity.

The digital revolution and today’s Internet have created disparate data silos: Netflix know which movies I like. Yelp knows what food and restaurants I like. TripIt knows when, where and with whom I travel. Foursquare knows what brands and locations I like and am loyal to. Plancast knows where I am going to be and allows me to share my plans with my social graph. You get the idea…Because the calendar is the single greatest representation of the way we spend our time, with whom, where we go and our personal and professional interests; it is the logical anchor for these data streams. The calendar of the future must tear down the walls of the data silos, and connect them together to provide context to the user.

There is a cultural revolution underway which is resetting the way people interact, share and collaborate. Being open is the new black. In many cases it is a generational divide – the older generation was raised on the foundation of privacy and secrecy – garden walls protecting their daily lives. By 2004, with the launch of Facebook – and the ecommerce explosion behind us – our comfort levels have increased and we are becoming acclimatized to open and sharing environments. Today people share their interests, their locations and their intentions. Why? Because increased transparency allows for greater productivity and personalization.

We never know how much time we have left in the bank of life. We live in a world where everybody suffers from two common pain points; too much information, and not enough time. We can never make up for lost time. Everything we do is an investment of time. Because we can’t make or get more time we need to optimize the way we choose to spend it. When we start investing too heavily in one area of our life and neglecting another we create an imbalance. Harmony is about finding equilibrium. The future of calendaring is about measuring the way we want to spend our time against the way we actually do, and helping us to align our professional lives against our personal goals.

Our calendars will help us live intentionally. It’s life…optimized.

We have assembled the opinions of some of the industry’s brightest minds to weigh in on what the calendar of the future might look like and the benefits it might provide to our personal and professional lives.

Check out the Manifesto at www.calendarofthefuture.com

[/quote]

Thanks for the link. Will take a look at it for sure !

[quote=Armando]

That said, tungle.me is installed on my computer but I don't really use it... Anyway, I think it's good to be aware of where it's all going.

[/quote]

Yes, or rather, where it may be going... (remember 14 months ago, Wave was just out and it was the way of the future for emails... well, Wave is dead, for now anyway)

[quote=Pierre_Admin]

Yes, or rather, where it may be going... (remember 14 months ago, Wave was just out and it was the way of the future for emails... well, Wave is dead, for now anyway)

[/quote]

Yes, "may" is a better word choice... :)

It's good to be sceptical.

What is almost sure though is that the general trends outlined are there to stay...

that doesn't mean that I'd share my calendar with the whole world etc. as some Facebook users do...

Tungle is an attempt to add value to calendars. It is hardly surprising that the blog entry you quote puts the calendar at the heart of all that we do. However, we InfoQube users know better. We see the future in terms of information "items" or "things", some of which are indeed calendar appointments - but most of which are not!

Sure, but there's still something to be learned there as 1- IQ also uses a calendar interface (amongst other things) 2- and networking is hugely important .

Some of these concepts can be generalized to "all items" -- in the past Pierre suggested avenues that could be exploited like HTML content being refreshed or re-fetched, or why not just fetched depending on the content of your item field, etc.

I personally use my calendar a lot, so I can see how some of these "features" could be handy. As we all noticed though, it's a lot of hype and maybe not that much content. Nothing there is really "new" like I said in my first post.

[quote=gregory] [snip]. However, we InfoQube users know better. We see the future in terms of information "items" or "things", some of which are indeed calendar appointments - but most of which are not![/quote]

Yes & no. Limiting the use of the calendar to appts is not a broad enough view. A simple example is benchmarking & deadlines. The ability of 2 way communication w a calendar to ANY item or THING is invaluable IMO. On top of that to add appts, anniversaries, etc is a convenience.

And I agree w Armando, that the calendar should be conversant with web. I believe Pierre has stated that he is committed to having IQ calendar sync w Google calendar which makes a lot of sense & I think is manifestly better than any other practical idea I can think of because it is such a good common denominator & is so user friendly. This becomes especially important with the development of Android & WebOs smartphones which pull Google calendar data (or is it Google calendar that pushes?). Plus Google calendar allows user to add or subtract info to calendar so no need to re-invent the calendar wheel in IQ. For example, one might want to keep all birthdays, anniversaries, holidays on Google & not on IQ. Same for moon phase, weather, etc.

And eventually there even might be some interchange with single grid data -- example Contact list TLI -- with Google contacts. but that's good for another thread.

Finally I will add a link here to the 2 reminders I left for Pierre from prior discussions so it's all in one place. www.sqlnotes.net/drupal5/index.php

2010/08/29 > Added thought(s)

option to be able to click on graphic calendar day & see the output of my 'journal"; i.e. all data inputted on a particular day. This would be in addition to current date filter setup which is quirky until you learn how to use it.