Twistory, which lets people save their tweet backlog to their favorite calendaring application, has finally come through with full support for popular Web-based calendaring service Google Calendar.

You can now subscribe to Twistory using your existing Twitter account and automatically view in Google Calendar when you’ve tweeted what. Up until now, compatibility with Google Calendar was a little flaky, but the team behind Twistory tells me it is now finally stable.

Twistory is available for free, allowing you to visualize your last month worth of tweets in your calendaring application of choice.

There’s also a paid version, Twistory Pro ($1/month), which gives you access to your entire Twitter backlog (currently limited by Twitter to 3,200 tweets) and allows you to export your entire Twitter history as a CSV file.

While it hasn’t always been clear just how big of a bet Google was going to make on Chrome OS, after Google I/O today, it seems very clear that they’re very serious. With the launch of Chromebooks, Google is aiming to strike right at the heart of Microsoft and the Windows stronghold. But they know that one big hold up remains before a browser-based OS can be everywhere: offline access.

With that in mind, on stage today, Google’s Sundar Pichai revealed that Google has internally been using offline versions of their three most popular apps for months now: Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs. And this summer, all users will be able to use these apps offline too.

All of this is a long time coming for Google. They’ve had options for going offline in the past with things like Gears, but it wasn’t perfect. And actually, Gears is no longer being supported by Google as Chrome gains many of the same features via HTML5.

Pichai also noted that there are already hundreds of apps in the Chrome Web Store with offline access. And that includes almost every game in the store. This, on top of the built-in 3G connectivity is all vital to ensure the vitality of Chromebooks, Pichai noted.

It seems we only mention Google Calendar here on TechCrunch anymore when things inevitably go wrong – which means we get to cover the cloud-based calendaring service quite often, unfortunately.

We’ve been getting a ton of tips from people whose scheduled meetings and whatnot have apparently all been eaten by Google (as has The Next Web, which covered the issue of wiped out user calendars earlier this morning).

I’m not seeing anything off with my own Google Calendar, but the problem appears widespread, judging by the chatter on Twitter and this support forum entry. No surprise: a calendar happens to be primarily used to remember appointments and events so you don’t have to – having all entries deleted from it seems like a surefire way to freak people out.

Google acknowledges the problems on its apps status dashboard, displaying this message:

We’re experiencing an issue affecting less than 0.125% of the Google Calendar user base. The affected users are able to access Google Calendar, but are seeing error messages and/or other unexpected behavior.

We will provide an update by February 23, 2011 12:52:00 PM UTC+1 detailing when we expect to resolve the problem.

Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.

Affected users may be missing entries in their calendars.

I haven’t been able to find out how many users Google Calendar has, but judging by the noise that less than 0.125% of its user base are making, I’m guessing there’s quite a few of them.

Update: the message now reads ‘less than 0.001%’ of the user base.

Update 2: another update to the status message, which now reads:

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.

Update 3: the problem should now be fixed (took a while):

The problem with Google Calendar should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better.

Based on the status message and some responses on the support forum thread, it appears this is merely a visualization issue, which would mean Google hasn’t messed up too bad by effectively losing user data. We’ve contacted Google for more information.

I have to admit, though, the idea of having an empty calendar seems strangely utopian to me.

Looks like a subset of Google Calendar users are running into the same issue when trying to load the service this morning. Based on a flurry of complaints vented on Twitter, it looks like the service gets caught in an infinite loop and keeps reloading / redirecting for some users, regardless of which browser they use.

From what we can gather, also from the Google Calendar Help forum, clearing cookies seems to fix things (but yelling doesn’t).

Update: Google has updated its Apps Status Dashboard and released a brief notice:

We’re aware of a problem with Google Calendar affecting a significant subset of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Calendar, but we’ve provided a workaround below. Google Apps Premier Edition users are not affected by this problem. We will provide an update by June 9, 2010 9:02:00 AM UTC-7 detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.

To resolve this issue, clear your cookies or sign out and then sign back into your Google account.

Google Calendar has been plagued with downtime for an extended period of time last April, and again in May. Does that mean we now get a monthly appointment with the FAIL?

UPDATE 2: Google has resolved the issue.

A week ago, many Google Calendar users were affected by an extended outage. Today, it’s down again, and this time it’s affecting the majority of users. And it’s been going on for well over an hour now. Ugh.

We’ve reached out to Google to see what the issue is this time (and why this keeps happening) and will update when we hear back. The Google App Status Dashboard has two updates so far. At 8:30 they wrote:

We’re aware of a problem with Google Calendar affecting a majority of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Calendar. We will provide an update by May 6, 2010 9:00:00 AM UTC-7 detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.

And then at 9:00 they wrote:

Our team is continuing to investigate this issue. We will provide an update by May 6, 2010 9:30:00 AM UTC-7 with more information about this problem. Thank you for your patience.

While the web page for Calendar appears to be loading, none of the actual calendar data is.

All services have downtime from time to time (cable, the phone company, etc), the problem is that Google is trying to get everyone to trust that they can move all their data to the cloud. When a pattern of downtime keeps occurring, obviously, that’s going to be a harder sell.

Update: A new update on the App Status Dash says that they’re still looking into the issue:

Our team is continuing to investigate this issue. We will provide an update by May 6, 2010 10:00:00 AM UTC-7 with more information about this problem. Thank you for your patience.

Update 2: Google has updated the Dashboard again saying the issues has been resolved. Here’s the message:

The problem with Google Calendar should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better.

Additionally, Google got back to me, pointing to this page for a full report about last week’s outage (see the PDF linked to on that page).

Google wants us to move all of our data to the cloud. And yet, they keep having issues where a service that many people rely heavily on goes down. The latest is Google Calendar, which has been down for many people for well over an hour now.

The App Status Dashboard, and Google Calendar’s Twitter account confirm the disruption, but won’t say what caused it. We have an email into Google as well and will update when we hear back. The Dashboard is listing it as a “Service disruption” rather than a “Service outage,” as it appears that it’s not hitting all users — but judging from Twitter reactions it’s at least thousands, if not more.

Over the past year, Gmail, Google’s most important web app, has had a series of high-profile outages. Plenty of services, including Google’s, often get disrupted for a few minutes at a time, but these issues have been of a much larger scale, some as long as a few hours.

Obviously, the more that keeps happening, the harder it’s going to be to sell people on the idea of storing all their data online. Unless, of course, there’s an offline element. Google has that by way of Gears, but it’s ditching Gears in favor of HTML5 offline capabilities. However, not all browsers support that yet.

Update: More from App Status:

We’re aware of a problem with Google Calendar affecting a significant subset of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Calendar. We will provide an update by April 28, 2010 11:36:00 AM UTC-7 detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.

Update 2: Google says the issue has been resolved. From the App Status page:

The problem with Google Calendar should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support.

The only thing worse than company meetings is trying to schedule one. The more people who need to be at that meeting, the harder it is to find a time slot that works with everyone’s schedule. A new Google Calendar Labs feature called the Smart Rescheduler brings some search smarts to the problem. “Overnight, all the Google apps customers will get this,” says Google Calendar product manager Cyrus Mistry. “It is like we are giving every employee their own administrative assistant.”

The person scheduling the meeting enters the names of the participants, how long the meeting will be, and a date by when the meeting must take place. The Smart Rescheduler then goes out and looks at everyone’s calendar to see when everyone is free, taking into account different time zones and other commitments on their calendars (in order for this to work, all the meeting attendees must share their calendars with Google Calendar).

All too often at this point in the process, someone has a conflict. What the Rescheduler does is look at all the soft constraints and actually ranks the best meeting times. Different attendees can be prioritized so the meeting is set around their schedule. Soft constraints are taken into account like partial schedule overlaps, times blocked with no other attendees, meetings where someone’s been invited but hasn’t yet accepted, or meetings organized by that person. These factors often indicate a schedule that can be altered.

Google Calendar throws all of these factors together and comes up with a ranking for the best possible meeting time. “We did look at algorithms for search to see how they solved which doc should come to the top,” says Mistry. “We discover what meeting should come out on top.” The Rescheduler can even book new conference rooms based on which one is closest to the original one and the same size.

Google Calendar may not be the sexiest product Google offers, but, as with Gmail, there are plenty of people who use it to manage their business and personal lives (and wind up staring at it for hours each week as a result). Today, we’ve gotten our hands on a screenshot showing what appears to be an internal build of Google Calendar, giving us an idea of what a forthcoming UI refresh might look like. We’ve included photos of both the internal version and the current version below for comparison’s sake (be sure to click on the photo for a larger version).

As far as we can tell, the changes are all aesthetic and fairly minor but they add up to make a difference — the new version looks more modern, and it also looks more like Google’s other Apps. The new version replaces many of the text-based navigation links with the sleeker silver buttons, which are also found throughout Gmail and Google Docs. The calendar has been spruced up a bit, and the entire interface is now surrounded by a colored border (in the current version, some text and links and hover above the calendar, which looks a little less polished).

You’ll also notice a worldwide clock in the screenshots of the new UI. These aren’t part of the default Google Calendar site now, but you can activate it through Google Calendar Labs, which launched last summer.

New

Old

Once you’ve activated Sneak Preview (assuming you have access to it), whenever you create a new event you’ll see a new viewing mode that displays a calendar alongside your event details. This calendar will show the schedules of each of the people you’ve invited to the event (provided you’re a friend or coworker with access to that information), and the proposed time for your event will appear as a semi-transparent blue box so you can quickly see where you might have conflicts. You can click each guest’s name to show/hide them on the calendar if some are more important than others.

Want to keep track of Yankees games, Bristol Rugby matches, or the schedule of the Taiwan Beer team (for all of you fans of the Taiwanese Super Basketball League out there)? Now you can subscribe to the schedules of your favorite professional sports teams on Google Calendar. Just click on “Add other calendars” in the left-hand column and browse “interesting calendars.”

Google just added sports calendars for football, baseball, basketball, rugby, hockey and soccer. It also released a few other features today, including the ability to add birthday reminders for your contacts. If you have their birthdays in Gmail contacts or it is in their Google profiles (we all have one of those, right), then it will automatically populate your calendar with their birthdays.

Google Calendar Labs also has two new features. Meetings that are scheduled on a repeated basis can be dimmed in the calendar. Those weekly staff meetings are so much background noise anyway. And now any Google Gadget can be added to your calendar.

Google Calendar now has its own Labs. Long one of the most popular features of Gmail, at least among the early adopter crowd, Labs is the tab in Settings where users can find and turn on experimental new features. Google Calendar Labs is launching with six features:

1. Background Image (now you can change it)
2. Attach a Document (to an event)
3. World Clock (see what time it is for the person you are trying to schedule a meeting with across the world)
4. Jump To Date (quick time-based navigation)
5. Next Meeting (shows how much time is left before your next one)
6. Free or Busy (shows the status if your friends and co-workers)

If you don’t yet see the Labs setting, it should be rolling out gradually across all Google Calendar users.

In conjunction with the rollout of Google Calendar Labs, Google is also opening up new APIs for developers to change the Google Calendar interface. Google Calendar can act as a gadget container complete with hooks into OpenSocial apps and OAuth authentication, or apps can be written as new sidebar features. The new Labs features were written using the gadget API. Maybe someone will write a Google Calendar app like Facebook events which makes it easy to organize and add events to your calendar directly from Gmail, or better yet, Facebook.

What new features would you like to see come out of Google Calendar Labs?

In January, Google released an offline version of Gmail based on Google Gears. Last month, it began offering an offline version of Google Calendar to enterprise app customers. Today, the rest of us get to try the offline calendar, which is also based on Google Gears.

Once you click on the “Offline” link at the top of the page, the application asks you once to enable Google Gears for the Calendar. After you do that, it allows you to read your calendar when you are not connected to the Internet. A Calendar icon appears on your desktop. When you click on it, your browser opens up to show your recent schedule (it only goes back a month). For the most part, the offline version is read-only. You cannot edit existing entries until are back online. However, you can add new entries.

There are obviously some syncing issues going on here, but it seems that Google should be able to figure out how to let you edit your calendar and then sync once you are connected. Without that ability, it is a hampered product. But it is still better than no offline access whatsoever.

After announcing the offline feature for Gmail last week, Google allowed another feature to be viewed offline: Google Calendar. Unfortunately, the masses will have to wait for access. The offline access, which was built using Google Gears, is currently only available to users of business software package, Google Apps.

While the offline feature for calendars offers read-only access for enterprise users, it’s not nearly as useful as offline Gmail, where users can write and save emails that will be sent once online. The new offline calendar application doesn’t allow you to create, edit or delete events.

So what’s the next feature to join the offline party? And when will Google let consumers use the offline calendar?

Upon opening a Jiffle calendar, users are presented with a schedule of their associate’s availability. With a few clicks, a new appointment can be created in a manner that will come naturally to anyone who’s used a standard calendar application.

Jiffle believes that its application could be a boon to participants in Google’s Adwords program. After clicking on an appealing ad, consumers will no longer have to call customer support or sales representatives to schedule appointments – they can simply add themselves into an available time slot. Jiffle also thinks that Cisco’s WebEx could be used in conjunction with the service to further expedite meetings.

There are some strong competitors to Jiffle, including TimeBridge, which already supports Google Calendar. TimeBridge also helps facilitate group meetings through use of a point system, which allows users to vote on their preferred times. We expect to see other major developments in this space very soon.

Calendar for mobile devices [Via Official Google Blog]

Dave Winer may have been the first to write about it on Scripting.com. CNET also has a story.

My first impression – It’s fast, slick and stable. Calendar is Ajax driven and, as I mentioned, very fast. Adding an event is as easy as typing “Dinner with Keith tomorrow at 8pm” and Calendar structures the data properly and places a correct calendar entry. This entry can be dragged around the screen to a new day or time.

The Key features:

• Text recognition – In adding an event, or detecting a new event from Gmail, Calendar automatically detects event-specific words and suggests the adding of a new event with data auto-structured.
• Manage Multiple Calendars – set up multiple calendars (work, personal, etc) and view them separately or together.
• Heavy Gmail integration – Gmail recognizes when messages include event information, so when you get emailed about an event, you can add it to Google Calendar with just a couple clicks. Google Calendar links on the right side of the Gmail page.
• Sharing – Calendars can be shared with others, and you can subscribe to others’ shared calendars. Read/write permissions can be granted on a per user basis. Calendars can be published via a web page or via RSS, so readers do not need to be on the Google Calendar platform.
• Importing – You can import events from other calendar programs, including Yahoo Calendar and Microsoft Outlook. Click “Settings,” then “Import Calendar”.
• Calendar Search

The key driver of Google Calendar is clearly going to be the Gmail integration. For users of Gmail’s web interface, it will be extremely easy to keep track of Calendar items on Google as well.

My overall impression: Excellent. The ability to share via web publishing or RSS shows Google’s commitment to an open stardard. And this application is impressive in its speed and stability.

Screen Shots:

I am now in possession of screenshots from Google’s long delayed new Ajax calendar application, which will be called “CL2″ (the CL2 login screen is here). It was only a matter of time before someone broke down and leaked these – as far as I know these screen shots are the first on the public web. Previous ones were almost certainly photoshopped fakes. These are real.

Om Malik also recently posted with some additional details and has been trying to track down more information. Now we have it.

Here is the default view of Google’s new CL2 Calendar:

There have been leaks before today, however. Rumor has it that one of the beta testers provided credentials to Yahoo…although Yahoo notified Google (after a thorough review of the product I suppose).

The closed beta is ongoing with about 200 participants – people involved are not allowed to invite outsiders to see the calendar and are under strict rules not to share any details with outsiders. Based on feedback I am getting, CL2 is a long way away from launch.

About CL2

CL2 makes it easy — even effortless — to keep track of all the events in your life and compare them to what your friends and family have going on in theirs. We’ve designed a calendar that works for you — helping you add events from email, friends, and other public calendars — so you don’t have to spend all your time maintaining your schedule. CL2 even helps you discover new events you might be interested in. We think it’s a great tool for managing your daily schedule, keeping track of what everyone in your family is doing, organizing events for a club or team, or creating public events that you can promote to the world.

CL2 is closely, very closely, integrated with Gmail. It includes now-standard web 2.0 features – Ajax, subscription feeds for integration with iCal and other desktop calendars, event creation, search, sharing, notifications (including SMS) and more.

It’s also clear from the event creation functionality that Google is is going to attempt to aggregate events like eventful and zvents do now. If they combine their event creation feature with a web crawl and parsing of event data (exactly what zvents does), they will be able to create a very large events database. From the CL2 Trusted Tester Guidelines:

Creating Events

You can create events on your calendar in a number of ways.

Click ‘Create Event.‘ This brings you to the create event page, where you can enter information about your event.

Click on Quick Add (or type the letter Q). Quick Add gives you a text box where you can type all the information about your event in normal English, and we’ll fill out the form for you. We’re pretty excited about this feature, so please let us know how it works for you.

Drag-to-create. If you’re looking at the day where you want to create an event on your calendar, just click and drag your mouse from the desired start time to the end time. Once you’ve selected your time range, you can just choose a title for your new event.

Event Pages

Whenever you create an event, we create a web page which you’ll see when you click on the “more details” link on any event. This web page is only visible to you, unless you’ve invited other people to your event or made the event public, in which case you can use the page to share information about the event with people who are attending or the public at large. Note: you don’t have to be a CL2 user to be able to see event pages, so you can use these pages to share information with anyone involved with the event, regardless of what online tools (if any) they use. (Ever wish your favorite local band would learn how to use HTML and publish their calendar? Once we get your feedback and open CL2 to the world you can help them do just that.)

I am not going to publish the full guidelines because there is information included around becoming a tester that I feel is inappropriate for public disclosure.

Overall, CL2 is a very impressive product. The tight integration with Gmail will make that an even more compelling product. Other online calendar applications are going to have a very hard time competing.

Additional Screen Shots: