In trying to arrange stuff I suggested that the parties involved stuff their calendars into google. We all have google accounts and google lets you share information about when you’re busy so you can see about finding some time when you’re all not. Great!

Sharing calendars though, that’s done in a really stupid way.

Unless you actually call your calendar “Bob’s calendar”, in your prefs, nobody can tell it’s you. And that’s not made clear. So I have no reason to suspect I should call my calendar anything other than “personal” or “gcal” or “calendar”, because it’s mine, but in my friends’ lists it just has the same obtuse name I gave it. Google knows exactly who that calendar belongs to, but it won’t tell you. You can at least re-name the shares you see, once you work out whose is whose.

Another thing: I have work and I have play, and I am busy for reasons that fall into each of these; calendar entries are divided accordingly. Why then, when sharing busy/free-level information, does it still show my friends both of these calendars? All I want them to know is if I’m busy, not why I’m busy (since I might be busy giving their mum a good seeing to).

And don’t even get me started on how iCal sees all this, though the wacky distorto-lens that is Google’s own special idea of how calDAV delegation should work.