Some people have asked us how to use Google calendar to subscribe to their Mosuki calendar.
Unlike calendaring programs like iCal, Sunbird, and Evolution, Google calendar can’t read calendars on the web that require authentication. Precisely because your Mosuki calendar contains private events, we can’t make your Mosuki calendar publicly available on the web. If Google can download your entire Mosuki calendar with private events on it, so can anyone else on the entire internet.
Google calendar is also designed to be used with public calendars on the web. If you enter a URL to a calendar on another website, it adds that calendar to your Google calendar. Every few hours, it hits that URL, and adds the contents of that calendar to Google’s index.
Your Mosuki calendar can contain lots of private events. Do you want “Suprise birthday party for Bob,” “Fetish Club Night,” “Dinner date to have extramarital affair” in Google’s index? We didn’t think so.
So, your Mosuki calendar:
- requires a password to see
- doesn’t belong in Google’s index
Until it can handle these functions, Google calendar won’t work with Mosuki. Google calendar is a useful and interesting product. But right now it is providing very different functionality from Mosuki.
Update, July 6th, 2007:
We recently had reason to re-run our test for this security hole in Google calendar (more on this later), and you’ll be pleased to know that it no longer appears to be a problem. And an export-to-Google feature is in the works.
You can of course export your mosuki calender then upload it to your google calender…
Seems to me that you can use url-based authentication to allow subscribing to mosuki calendar feeds from within google calendar. I would certainly have concerns about putting my password in the url I give to google, but as a workaround mosuki could generate random alternate tokens that could be used as a password in the URL but would allow read-only access to the feed. Not perfect, but certainly workable and useful to those users who might want to opt-in.
I’m definitely having a lot of trouble trying to manage my exchange work calendar, my google social calendar, and now my mosuki alternate social calendar. Mosuki isn’t likely to entirely replace my Google Calendar (mosuki’s strengths lay beyond being a simple calendar), but until I can consolidate somehow i think my uptake of mosuki will continue to be significantly hindered. But I really want to use it! Please support google calendar somehow!
The problem is not just that Google Calendar doesn’t support authentication. It’s that your private events will get sucked into Google’s index. Nobody wants their private events, like “Go to Fetish Club with Senator Jones” or “Drive girlfriend to abortion” in Google’s index.
These are extreme examples, but everybody has activities that they’d rather not expose to the entire universe.
If Google Calendar respected the privacy field in the iCalendar standard, or if it allowed users to specify that some calendars shouldn’t be indexed, there would be no problem with URL-based authentication.
glyphobet, that may or may not be true for all users. Many users of Google Calendar are already keeping private data in their personal Google calendars. Whether you trust Mosuki with your private data and/or Google is entirely up to you.
Incidentally you can tell Google not to publicly index your private calendars. I believe this is even the default for calendars imported via external urls.
emmby, you are right, it’s certainly not true for all users. our concern is many users out there don’t realize how transparent their information is on social networks. the recent incidents involving myspace (Adults question MySpace’s safety) and facebook
(Facebook’s “Privacy Trainwreck”) are clear indications of this. we don’t believe users should have to understand all the ramifications of adding data to social networks, we believe social networks should protect their users and respect their data.
as for google calendar, the only privacy control you have over public address feeds is that you can tell google to not add the feed address to its search. all the events themselves are still made public.
[...] We posted eight months ago about Google calendar’s lack of respect for private data. Chris Pirillo has a found a clever demonstration of this: just search for “user password” in public events, and you’ll come up with a huge list of usernames and passwords of all sorts. [...]