Use Google Calendar or iCal? Do you get invites to events on facebook? Want to track your friends’ birthdays in GCal or iCal?
fbCal is a facebook application (an old one, in fact) that crunches all of your friends’ birthdays and events into two separate subscribable iCalendar files. Setting it up is painfully easy, just follow the instructions on the Create tab and you will get a set of links to use to subscribe to your calendars.
Why is this so cool? Well, exporting your friends’ birthdays to a calendar application doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, until you start thinking about how you are always adding new friends, and you don’t want to keep updating the calendar every time you add a new friend. Adding someone to your calendar after friending them is a completely extraneous and unnecessary step, when you think about it - the data is all ‘out there’, it’s just a matter of getting it where it needs to be, which is what fbCal is doing. It makes even more sense when you start thinking about facebook events, because those are always changing, so you don’t want to have to either: A. Manually copy events into your regular calendar out of facebook, or B. Keep that event out of your regular calendar and just depend on facebook to remember it for you. Seems kind of silly, eh?
iCals are great for more than just simple calendars like this or sports schedules, what about being able to having an iCal to subscribe to for all of your classes? If the professor needs to cancel a class, just drop it from the calendar - look at old notes on that day’s entry in the calendar, or see when assignments or tests are in the future. What about your work schedule or calendar? If you work in some place with an irregular schedule, why not access that as an iCal too? That way as the schedule for the next week is written up, it automatically appears in your calendar and you don’t have to worry about stuff getting messed up along the way.
Comments 1
WHOA. I just emailed Facebook two days ago asking them to export birthdays as XML/ICAL. I used fbCal a while back to export them, but I didn’t know they’ve updated to make it subscribable and dynamic.
AWESOME. Thanks for the tip, dude.
Posted 21 Mar 2008 at 9:27 am ¶Post a Comment