Calendars — and their formats — have had to deal with proprietary solutions since day one of the personal productivity era, let alone the web. Finally with services like Google Calendar and devices like the iPhone, we see a lot of convergence, but it’s still far from a standard solution consumers would prefer. Enter FuseCal.
FuseCal has two primary functions: they allow you to save — or scrape — events from the web directly onto your personal calendar, and for the advanced lot, publish calendars on their own websites. In a way, I like to think of it as a “FriendFeed for calendars/events.”
The primary action with FuseCal is importing calendars. You can enter the URL of any iCal file or web page, and and FuseCal will go ahead and harvest the data — doing its best to import it into your personal calendar at FuseCal. Obviously, calendar files are imported without any trouble, but where FuseCal shines is in scraping normal data. Once you’ve gathered your events, you can save your whole calendar feed into almost every service available — namely Windows Calendar, Outlook, Google Calendar, Yahoo! Calendar, and iCal.
The secondary action with FuseCal makes it possible for bloggers, website owners and publishers to publish their calendar onto their webpage. Give it a name, an initial page URL, and FuseCal will give you an embed code for your badge. Here, visitors can save your events into their own personal calendars — great for conferences and the like.
FuseCal is a great utility for a lot of users. Of course, one may only use it to gather feeds and then subscribe to them in Google Calendar, but the functionality it offers is useful and unseen. For people who attend a lot of conferences or events from the web, and people who simply want to converge their calendars, FuseCal is great.
