It is very disappointing that there is a “vs” in the title of this post instead of a “supports”. Google Calendar does not have any support for microformats (uF) but this is pretty much standard behaviour for them recently. Given the resources available to them and the great applications that could be built on the back of uF + Google Calendar, their short term thinking and half-baked recent releases are becoming harder and harder to forgive. There has been huge coverage of the launch of the product but it is utterly me-too compared to many exisiting calendars. However, James Corbett disagrees and has a challenging post over at Eirepreneur where he states that:

I do think James is mixing his feelings on an interesting but niche hack (a greasemonkey script) with SB and uF in general. I posted a retort as a comment on his blog and I think it is worth re-posting here as it summarises my current thinking on SB and uF quite well.

In fact, to show how bad it is, try adding the Web2.0 Conference details to Google Calendar using the greasemonkey script, click on the map link in Google and watch it utterly fail to parse “DCU, Glasnevin, Dublin”.

I agree with exactly the text of what Robin says but probably not the intent. All of the major advances on the web have been so-called short term hacks where bigger loftier grand designs have failed. HTML is everywhere, SGML nowhere. rel=tag on nearly a quarter of blog posts, full blown “Semantic Web” nowhere. RSS everywhere, WS-* nowhere.

I’ll take a hack anyday that is available now to solve a problem or scratch an itch now instead of a pipedream in N years time.

Like all useful technologies, I am convinced structured blogging and microformats will permeate everywhere when they become trivial to do and use. At the rate they are going, I see that happening this year. As I said above, technorati tags are being added to nearly a quarter of blog posts. And that is not exactly natural. I believe people do things which make their lives easier or more interesting. I see some real killer apps coming with SB and uF which will be far beyond a simple calendar.

Google Calendar is fine and dandy if you believe we should all use one email system and one calendaring system. But I’ve lived in the IE/Outlook world and I don’t want to repeat that in GoogleVille. I want open, interoperable systems where I own the content and I make it available to you, not some “we’re not evil, really” datacenter operator slurping up all of the worlds data and making it available back to you on their terms.

technorati tags: StructureBlogging, microformats, GoogleCalendar, eirepreneur, Greasemonkey