Google Calendar Adds Labs and Opens Up An API

by editor on Jul.14, 2009, under TechCrunch

Google Calendar now has its own Labs. Long one of the most popular features of Gmail, at least among the early adopter crowd, Labs is the tab in Settings where users can find and turn on experimental new features. Google Calendar Labs is launching with six features:

Background Image (now you can change it)
Attach a Document (to an event)
World Clock (see what time it is for the person you are trying to schedule a meeting with across the world)
Jump To Date (quick time-based navigation)
Next Meeting (shows how much time is left before your next one)
Free or Busy (shows the status if your friends and co-workers)

If you don’t yet see the Labs setting, it should be rolling out gradually across all Google Calendar users.

In conjunction with the rollout of Google Calendar Labs, Google is also opening up new APIs for developers to change the Google Calendar interface. Google Calendar can act as a gadget container complete with hooks into OpenSocial apps and OAuth authentication, or apps can be written as new sidebar features. The new Labs features were written using the gadget API. Maybe someone will write a Google Calendar app like Facebook events which makes it easy to organize and add events to your calendar directly from Gmail, or better yet, Facebook.

What new features would you like to see come out of Google Calendar Labs?