my so-called blog (redux)

so, prompted by a (breif) discussion I had with a customer while I was extolling the wonders and benefits of .Mac, I gave a cursory glance at Plaxo. if memory serves, Plaxo made the rounds a few years ago when it was new. the idea is pretty simple - you install a plugin into your mail client (currently, Outlook or Outlook Express) and you use their servers to keep your contact data up-to-date. the twist is that your contacts are actually prompted to update it themselves. the idea is clever, since having your contacts manage the data about themselves minimizes errors. the problem is it only works with Outlook and Outlook Express, and only on Windows. (just like the problem with .Mac is that it only works on a Mac and with iCal and Address Book unless you get something like PocketMac.) there are some other problems with it too that may not actually be problems - problems like what format is the data stored in and how do I get at it beyond their web interface and Outlook (things I can’t check since I don’t have a running PC anymore).

so, what really needs to happen is that someone needs to implement a similar service that works with open standards. why not move data back and forth using vCal and vCard formats - pretty much everyone who matters supports them. bonus points if you make a plugin for Outlook (et. al), Entourage, iCal/Address Book/iSync, and Mozilla Thunderbird/Sunbird.

while we’re talking about calendaring, let me just say that iCal in the enterprise (or even in the I-need-to-coordinate-multiple-people-prise) sucks. iCal is great at what it does as long as you’re just scheduling yourself. once you get past that it’s less good - sure, there’s the capabilities (in iCal 2) to invite people (which involves sending everyone a nice vCal file - which in and of itself isn’t a bad idea) and to publish your calendar (which unfortunately is a read-only thing) but there’s not much else besides that. if I have a calendar published and someone else on my project needs to update it, they need to schedule it on their iCal and then send me an invite so I can put it on the “official” calendar. there should be a way to have a server (it can even be based on WebDAV) to do this - just have a folder that represents the calendar itself and then vCal files for each event. you’d still have the generate-event-invite-maintainer model for people who you don’t want to give calendar access to but everyone else should just be able to publish it to the server and everyone updates. speaking of I wonder how hard it is to write plugins for iCal..