Yahoo has gone one for one with Google, acquiring an equivalent company for every service that Google offers, but what if you have some of one and some of the other?
Yahoo has flickr, Google has Picasa. Yahoo has Yahoo mail, Google has gmail. Yahoo has del.icio.us, Google has... I’m sure they’ve got something similar. Google also has blogger, and the list goes on... Point is, these two companies own a large share of what we use on the internet, day to day.
If you’ve got the del.icio.us extension for firefox (and you should), It makes bookmarking a lot better, and is practically indispensible. The del.icio.us site has flickr extensions so you can see pictures on flickr directly. This is fine, because flickr and del.icio.us are better than google’s offerings, but sometimes there’s clashes (like blogger’s integration with Picasa being slightly better than blogger’s integration with flickr). Similarly, I’m sure that google calendars don’t have support for upcoming.org. There’s been a void of decent applications in the calendaring arena on the internet, and now there’s two, but do they fit the bill?
I think both applications achieve a third of the goals of calendaring apps, with a desktop application getting the final third. Let’s use gmail as an example: Gmail can forward emails via pop3. This is excellent, because I can use gmail to get access to email on my home email client, and I can access those same emails on the internet for when I’m not at home. Better still, I’ll get those emails on my home email client when I get home. Hooray!
Now the calendaring problem: Google calendars has the ability to display calendars using iCal (which means that your calendaring client can look at your google calendar), but you can’t modify those calendar items! This means you need a separate local calendar which cannot be shared with google calendars. Tragedy!
The same problem is made worse by Upcoming. Upcoming has the advantage of telling you what’s “the haps” in the area. It’s like flickr for calendars. You can even get icals off the webnet and display it on your calendar. However, when it comes to adding new calendar items and sharing them around, you must revert to the web UI. Also, upcoming is not nearly as good as google calendars for keeping simple calendar items, so you’re not likely to use it as a one-stop shop for keeping your calendars.
So this means you need to be on google calendars to keep your calendar items which you want to share among friends, you need to be on upcoming to see and share calendar items that are more general (like concerts and such), and you need local calendars which are easily editable.
Somewhere out there, a calendar fairy is crying.
[EDIT] I should probably take this time to mention Chandler and hula.