What Time is It? It’s Google Time!
Important Details: Wasn’t it inevitable? Google Daylight Time.
I mean Google Calendar.
The company whose products page is a modern-day tapestry of our hyperkinetic 21st century lives now wants to become our clock and timer as well. Google Calendar is a kind of product, at least, whose time has come. While those wary of Google’s encroachment into our lives sounded more alarms at hearing the announcement about the beta (which some have pointed out is a real beta, with numerous beta issues), other bloggers expressed a different thought on many Web users’ minds: it’s about time. Representative of those is the post of Jeremy Zawodny, who asks: Why has it taken so long to do calendaring, and to integrate it well with other applications and mobile devices?
For news companies, the Google Calendar product is a reminder that the search aggregators are moving to take over the most basic newspaper franchises – think sports, business, comics, travel – one by one. Now they are on to local with a vengeance. Local is a prominent tab on all three GYM sites.
Key to local is info on what’s going on. Nobody collects, and spends more staff time collecting, more event and community calendar information than newspapers. Well-paid clerks sort all means of incoming announcements and have historically pestered those tardy in sending them in. That’s all been in an effort to create the most complete picture of community doings.
Unfortunately, those companies have done a relatively poor job of translating that wealth of data to the Web, in interfaces that should make newspapers’ online sites the destinations for things-to-do info. Even those that have done better than average – the Washington Post’s City Guide and Chicago Tribune’s Metromix – have not found the technologies to provide users what they want: a personalized calendar. It’s not hard to think it up. "My calendar" would be a mix of my personal appointments and family happenings. It could easily import dinners, theater tickets, kids’ recitals, dental appointments, and the like. I could share the calendar with friends and family, but keep it closed to the outside world.
But the technology’s not easy, and publishers have failed to get out of the box first. The search aggregators have been slow on it as well, as Microsoft stumbled with its Sidewalk entertainment product in the late ’90s (surely something that could have tied in with Outlook), and City Search settled into its role as a conduit to Ticketmaster.
Outsell’s recent survey of news users showed that Americans still turn to their daily newspapers first for "things-to-do" information, though not to their Web sites or even to GYM Web sites much at all.
Google’s Calendar and Yahoo!’s entertainment browser beta (which has been stuck in beta for a long time) show flip sides of the coming competition. Calendar lets users individualize their planning on the Web; Yahoo!’s entertainment browser shows them what’s going on locally and ties it together to mapping, ticketing, and user-generated content better than anyone else. Pair these two products, and you see a formidable foe for newspapers in the events arena.
It’s not that Yahoo!, Microsoft, and a host of start-ups haven’t put up Web-based calendaring sites, but none has gained much traction. It is Google Calendar that looks like a breakthrough in that arena. It incorporates the same cool AJAX that brought wow to Google Maps, offering a better reason to be included prominently in our daily lives. More importantly, it links up smoothly with Gmail, allowing users to incorporate events and event/meeting invitations into e-mails. It gives consumers three levels of openness – private, small designated group, or the WWW (World Wide Web or Whole Wide World?).
Expect that the Google Calendar/Google Base link will grow in importance over time, if Google can persuade events organizers big and small to routinely put their own events into Google Base. It’s the same self-service model that has made AdSense hugely profitable. Coming to a neighborhood near you: self-populated events, which could then be exposed contextually, and then tied to AdSense for new monetization. Pennies to community bake sales; quarters to Google.
In Outsell’s Opinion: Outsell believes that Google’s goal is clear.
While Google’s been lengthening its search lead over Yahoo! and MSN (see chart below), the time users spend with Google monthly is significantly less than time spent on Yahoo! (Yahoo! News holds users for almost 28 minutes per month, compared to 12 for Google News, for instance.) That’s a problem over the long term, as frequency and duration determine the big winners in the Paid Search Sweepstakes. Google needs more active user profiles to win that sweepstakes, and Google Calendar is one of its strongest add-on-to-search innovations so far.
Chart: https://clients.outsellinc.com/now/wp-content/UserFiles/Image/OSNow042806PreferredSearchEnginesThenNow.PNG