Benjamin Franklin said that more than 200 years ago, yet we still lose
much time in the modern world from everyday inefficiency and
confusion.
Personal computers and the Internet were supposed to have helped solve
those problems, following a burst of enthusiasm for online calendars
and scheduling programs in the late 1990s.
But that first generation of products didn't work particularly well
and were too difficult to use. While electronic calendars,
particularly the one in Microsoft Outlook, are widely used within some
big corporations, most people still keep track of their lives on
paper.
Silicon Valley is now revisiting the difficult question of time
management, with a new crop of online software and services from
companies big and small.
Their ideas were on display Tuesday at ``When 2.0,'' a one-day
conference held at Stanford University.
``I'm just excited the topic is coming up again,'' said Ray Ozzie,
chief technology officer of Microsoft and inventor of the Lotus Notes
software for organizing work group activity.
Ozzie sat on a panel that included Lotus co-founder Mitch Kapor,
moderated by technology doyenne Esther Dyson.
``There's much more pain around calendars than there is around
e-mail,'' Kapor told an audience of 165.
Kapor is an advocate for open-source software, where new programs are
created collaboratively and shared freely. He's backing an open-source
project called Chandler that will offer advanced tools for selectively
sharing your personal calendar entries with others.
Chandler is based on iCalendar, an open-source standard for sharing
calendar entries among different programs. Microsoft hasn't fully
supported iCalendar, greatly reducing its value, but it is swinging
fully into the iCalendar camp with the next version of Outlook, due in
2006.
Microsoft and the open-source community have yet to come to terms on
several other important technical standards. Kapor said he would sit
down with Ozzie immediately after the panel to start ironing out these
wrinkles, and the two men did spend time together at a picnic table
outside the hall.
Of course, you can't have a conference in Silicon Valley without
everyone wondering what Google will do.
There were rumors that at the conference Mountain View-based Google
would announce a free online calendar service, to compete with the
online calendars already offered by Yahoo and Microsoft.
Carl Sjogreen, a Google product manager, announced during the
question-and-answer period that Google would make no announcement.
But something is more than likely on the horizon. When I asked
Sjogreen what product he managed, he declined to answer -- leaving me
to wonder if he's the product manager for a Google calendar project
that's still in development.
Of the several start-ups presenting at When 2.0, my favorite was Renkoo.
The Palo Alto company plans to launch an online service early next
year that will provide a shared space for small groups to plan events.
If you want to invite a list of friends to a party with a fixed time
and place, it's easy to use the existing Evite service. But Evite
doesn't work well when you're not sure what you want to do, or what
your friends prefer.
With Renkoo, you can send a query by e-mail, instant message or
cell-phone text message, perhaps asking, ``Who wants to go for a hike
this weekend? What's the best time for you, and where do you want
go?''
Your friends then reply with their preferences, and the group goes
back and forth -- with the dialogue recorded on a single Web page --
until there's a consensus.
Renkoo, named for a form of Japanese poetry called renku or renga
where people take turns writing verses, will be free to users and
hopes to make money through ads and sponsorships.
Adam Rifkin, Renkoo's co-founder and chief executive officer, said he
aims to solve a basic problem: ``You can never get enough information
on what your friends are doing.''
While it's much too soon to know whether Renkoo or any of the other
bold proposals at When 2.0 will succeed, the vision at least is clear.
In a few years, we'll effortlessly manage our time by entering
appointments on whatever Internet-connected electronic device is at
hand -- a computer or a cell phone or a personal digital assistant --
and those appointments will instantly appear on the calendars of
others we designate.
If we change the time of an appointment, it will instantly update the
calendars of others.
Public and group events we want to track, from upcoming rock concerts
and professional hockey games to our children's soccer team schedules,
will automatically pop into our calendars.
There are lots of technical, security and privacy issues yet to
resolve, but the benefits are big enough that families may ultimately
be freed from running their lives through scraps of paper stuck to
refrigerator doors.
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