When Google first introduced their online calendar module, I was intrigued, and particularly impressed with the smooth incorporation to GMail. Over time, though, the number of potential appointments seem to have been increasing in the sidebar of my GMail app, culminating tonight with an email exchange with one of my friends:
What’s the rule for a potential calendar event? The word “meeting” and some unit of time? Is it possible to be approaching too much of a good thing? I’d frankly be interested to do a quick review of event emails, to try and determine a consistent structure. Regardless, I have a feeling that off-handedly mentioning that meetings only take one hour at work compared to grad school doesn’t constitute an actual calendar event.
But at the end of the day, I wonder if I’m a good example of a calendar user. I’m good at putting my meetings into the calendar, but I stop using it shortly thereafter. Maybe I’m not the ideal Google Calendar user.
I guess it is tricky when I never actually pick one of the meetings to prove correctness.
But my point is this – check out the last event email that you got. Wasn’t it a little more structured, or am I used to geeky social event emails from the MHCI program?
When I first set up my calendar, I organized everything into several different calendars to get the nice color coding and such. But then, I wanted to use it on my personalized google home page, and only the one calendar with your name as a title will show up. I had to reorganize everything into one calendar to see it all on the home page (which is where I’ll actually use it). That was my biggest usability problem.
I would say that the word “meeting” and a unit of time is a pretty good indication of a potential calendar event. My guess is that they use some sort of Hidden Markov Model to analyze text and look for phrases in an email that suggest a new event. The problem is that it should be trainable by each individual user like with junk mail filters. Theoretically it could then get better over time at picking out when you specifically do have a new calendar event.
I think you’re right.
But, perhaps they’re trying to find more events in casual language. Maybe you would decide to put something on your calendar that you wouldn’t have thought to otherwise. This will of course make you use their software even more, so you’ll view more ads, etc.
From their perspective, a false postivie wastes a little bit of real estate on your screen – a minor annoyance. But a false negative means you’re not using their system when you should be resulting in lost revenue for them. So I’m betting it is intentionally broad in what it guesses is a calendar event.
Um, for work maybe… but they can’t regulate my home life! I’m all Mac baby.
I actually don’t use Google calendar, though, and my use of iCal is limited (although I whipped together a nifty little alarm clock application using Automator last night at midnight. =D). Mostly I prefer to keep appointments in my head… this post was just a minor annoyance at Google’s ambitious meeting setting.
By the way, shouldn’t you be using outlook and whatever Microsoft calendar comes with it?
Yeah, I suppose Microsoft could always spin the infedelity as “competition research”.
hmmm…i am taking all this down as we speak.
the thing about the e-mails is whether Google is monitoring me! but that aside, I remember during our lab project, we had similar problems. At this point in technology, there’s no replacement except for a human.
Hm, My gmail-perception has apparently been sliding, because until you mentioned it, I hadn’t noticed. Anything google slams on the right side, I sort of ignore- that’s where the ads, directions, and now calendar events show up, which is not what I care about.