One thing that struck me recently is that Facebook has no dedicated Calendar app. It seems like it would be a perfect addition to such a ubiquitous social platform. Many parts of Facebook already have a pseudo calendar in the back-end. Events are heavily calendar based, but you never see the macro side of it. Each Event is its own island in the world of dates. Birthdays are prominent on the site. Groups and Pages can have their own events, which is kind of like separate/categorized Calendars. The only missing part is the centralized calendar portal to access and manage all of your events.
When you think about what a modern calendar is most useful for, it is for planning events. That is the bottom line. I get the impression that most people never consider having a publicly facing calendar. Their calendar is hanging on their wall, or stored in their phone, on their computer… but only accessible to them. It’s nothing more than a fancy looking notebook for dates. You schedule dentist appointments and major events for future dates, but its just a reminder for you. Only you need to know these things, nobody else, right? Maybe, but there is so much more you can do with calendars.
Anyone who has ever worked in an office environment that leveraged tools like Microsoft Exchange, Lotus, or Google Apps has probably seen the usefulness of a social calendar: Scheduling meetings. Instead of sending out a meeting invite by guessing a time and hoping it works for everyone, you can see everyone else’s calendar and reasonably guess that everyone will be free at that time. It isn’t perfect, but its a lot better than rescheduling a dozen times trying to find something that works for everyone.
The same is true outside of the office. How many times have you tried to plan a party, road trip, cookout, or a simple get together with friends only to change dates over and over before everyone can come. And then nobody shows up because there was that thing with their cousin that they forgot about. Or you send out a Facebook Event request to a bunch of friends, only to have them decline because they already have plans. If Facebook had a calendar built into it, it would solve so many of these problems.
The reason most people never take advantage of social calendar systems for personal use is because there is no good consumer calendar to use. Google Calendar is the closest, but there’s no incentive to use Google Calendar if you don’t already use other Google services. And lets be honest, for most people it doesn’t matter which email provider they use; Its just an email address, and they can all email each other. Google has no social platform to draw users to the platform. Facebook is different. If you’re on Facebook, chances are most (or all) of your friends are on Facebook too… thats why you use it, right? People check it like an addiction. Its on your phone, always open in a browser. If there was a calendar there, it would instantly become the most convenient calendar to use. That alone is the incentive to use it. Once people start using it, the rest is easy. Planning events would be a breeze; Add who you want to invite, and instantly see when they are free.
Facebooks privacy controls would be perfect here too. They’ve built up a really strong system of control for privacy settings over the past few years. Clearly you’d want to default your calendar to either completely private, or just “busy/free” mode where someone can see when you are busy but not what you are doing. But you could do so much more, tag calendar events to specific friend groups, pages, categories. Adjust the privacy for individual events. Maybe you’d want to let your roommates see all the events you have planned hosted in your apartment, but keep your calendar completely hidden from your parents. (love you mom and dad!)
I started this post simply because I love calendaring systems and it bugs me that there isn’t a good solution for everyone to use. I know why, though. It’s hard. Very hard. Even harder to do correctly. I can’t say I haven’t considered trying to write my own calendar system, but have you ever sat down to start planning something like that? Oh my god is it complicated. I wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook is working on this as one of their super secret projects, but I really wish it comes soon. It would be very useful to have.