The desire to meet is usually initiated via an email that proposes the topic/purpose of the meeting and perhaps a suggested time. This triggers the back and forth of arriving at a time that works for everyone. Even assuming the technology is in place, to make the process efficient requires that user take the time to check the schedules of others… this is a change in human behaviour, which is always tougher to achieve than technology changes :-).

[warning: blatent self promotion] I ran into the same issues that initiated this blog and setup a simple service for myself and my contacts to use. It hosts .ics and .vfb files and converts between the two formats, allowing Outlook and other client tools to at least have some interoperability. It will also convert .ics/.vfb into a visual representation of your schedule that you can send to others… i.e. “let’s meet to discuss this topic, you can see my available time at http://ifreebusy.com/neiljensen/freebusy” It’s not a true solution to the calendaring problem; but it is somewhat workable.

Jobi: iCal would be my bet as well. i love the iCal facilities in Evolution; but making the process of exporting and sharing these is just too hard right now.

I really would like to see something like what you asked for. I was mainly whining because I once thought about this for a living, had a similar vision, and thought the barriers were technological. The barriers are gone, and the vision doesn’t seem a whole lot closer.

But my larger point is very much the same as my pushback on REST / AJAX / Web2.0 / etc. — Just because you can use the basic web technologies to pick the low hanging fruit doesn’t mean that that the higher-up fruit will come with just a little bit more effort. Once you have to wrestle with semantic mismatches, security and privacy issues, and integrating a lot of existing infrastructure that will not be thrown away to make it easier for me to schedule an appointment with the dentist or the mechanic, the problems are orders of magnitude harder. Not impossible by any means, and there are no alternatives I’m hawking that make the problem dramatically easier, but I’m not holding my breath. Again I really hope I’m wrong, and I have to admit that the scenario of my dentist or mechanic writing a blog would have sounded absurd 10-12 years ago too, so take this with mass quantities of salt.

maybe i’m asking for something undeliverable - your background in the under-the-hood mechanics far outstrips mine, but i can’t believe that at a minimum an improved and simplified free/busy (one usable by regular people) is technically impossible. that just doesn’t make sense. and at some level, aren’t we really talking about ACL’s for text files with defined and established structures? hell, just take iCal and make it easy to use, promulgate, etc.

it’s obviously not easy - or we’d have it already - but it simply can’t be *that* hard.

But seriously, I think “blogging tools are to web content as ______ is to calendars” is not a realistic equation. Easy-to-update personal websites (blogs) are pretty easy given the existence of HTTP and HTML, and syndication (RSS etc.) was relatively easy because the basic semantics of a news feed were worked out by the wire services 70 years ago and could be easily mapped into XML. The fact that people fight over who REALLY was first to invent this stuff indicates than in a sense nobody invented it, or we all did maybe.

But calendars are another kettle of fish … Not only are there no widely deployed formats and protocols that do 90% of what is needed and can be leveraged for this, the semantics are not well-defined (if I’m “busy” because of lunch plans with a friend does that mean I’m not “free” if the Boss has a flaming crisis? If I’m out of office traveling does that mean I’m not available for a teleconference via cellphone?) Likewise, blogs and feeds are public information; that’s the whole point! But calendars are not … do people really want the world to possibly know about appointments with their psychiatrists, proctoclogists, etc.? Not that these are huge challenges to program around, but they DO require programming around and not everyone WILL get the privacy controls right the first time.

This may be another thing I’m just cranky about because I (working at a group scheduling software company about 10-12 years ago) had thought that what we needed was a universal network, lightweight client-side scripting, and a data interchange format to make it easy to schedule doctors’ appointments etc. We have the internet, Java/Javascript, and XML, and we don’t seem a whole lot closer. Likewise this has been something was supposed to be a killer app for technologies such as the semantic web stuff. I’m not really saying that this would violate fundamental laws of physics such as time travel would, but I’m afraid that it is not among the low-hanging fruit. And I hope someone proves me wrong!