Google Calendar Sees Disruptions, But Has a Bright Future


If you’ve had problems with Google Calendar in the past 24 hours or so, you’re not the only one. Google announced Calendar service problems faced by many users on its official app status website as of 9:15 am today, explaining that:

“Google Calendar service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change.”

As reported by 9to5google.com, Google is “continuing to investigate this issue” with the search giant announcing:

“We are working on getting the exact list of affected users. This is the first step towards fixing the issue. Next update within 3 hours.”

However inconvenient it may be to watch your neatly organized, colorful calendar blocks of time fail to organize your day, it’s worth knowing that Google Calendar has a bright future ahead of it.

Wired reported that the company recently acquired the calendar business Timeful, a collaborative effort between Dan Ariely, a well-known behavioral economist, and a number of artificial intelligence experts from Stanford University.

The project was designed to transform your calendar. The aim is to stop it being a series of appointments and business tasks that suck away your time like a black hole, instead ensuring you put healthy amounts of it into stuff that you like. Examples include achieving your goals, finding time for the things you really enjoy and building good habits.

Before rushing to purchase the Timeful app, however TechCrunch reported that due to the team spending more time focusing on Google projects, it may not see quite as much as support as you’d like. However, Timeful has stated on Twitter that it has no immediate plans to discontinue the application.

Given the fact that Google Calendar recently found its way onto iPhone, it’s possible the two might emerge in the not-too-distant future.

Prior to the Google acquisition, the team raised $7 million in venture capital funding. They pitched the project as combining both behavioral psychology and the latest developments in machine learning that will transform a calendar into “powerful temporal spreadsheets”.

The project has a number of patents pending and in an interview with Wired, Stanford researcher, Yoav Shoham, told the publication:

“Everybody in the company really deeply believes that time is by far our most precious resource, much more precious than money, and by far harder to manage.”

Would you let a Google Calendar AI manage real life for you? Let us know in the comments.

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