Killer calendar

Webapps are the rage these days. I think personal information management is one of the key areas where web apps have a very good chance to make inroads into conventional desktop applications, and here's why:

• these days we use computers at work, at home, on the plane, in a cafe – everywhere. We would like to have seamless access to our personal information everywhere. But personal information is personal, so security it important. You don't want to carry around your laptop with you everytime though. Most places have Internet access – why not put everything online?
• We've already seen some very rich internet apps around personal information management. There's email, to-do lists, organizer.

I think a critical piece in this puzzle thats missing right now is a rich web based calendar. Currently I just use something like unison/rsync to keep my calendar/contacts updated on each computer I work at. This is cumbersome, but it works. Email synchronization is a mostly solved problem (IMAP). But synching the calendar and contacts this way is problematic.

For a while I was using Yahoo! calendar – its highly functional (reminders, recurrances, holidays). But I think the interface still needs a lot of work. There is no free/busy support, nor is there any iCal/vCal support as far as I could tell. I want to be able to subscribe to other calendar sources and aggregate free/busy information and so on.

There was quite a rumor about Google releasing a web based calendar, but it hasn't happened yet. I won't mind if the folks at 37signals.com did it – but someone should do it, and do it fast!

I don't care too much about web based email and addressbook because I access email from a variety of sources, and for a variety of reasons its not possible to access them all online. Further, I need to access my addressbook across all of my email accounts in a seamless manner – again, for a variety of constraints this is not always possible online. A local client like KMail is much more flexible in this regard.

Although I'm quite happy with my current setup in KDE (kontact, basket) I think I'll give backpackit and tadalist a try. A few less things to synchronize.