Tungle Asks: What Does the Calendar of the Future Look Like?

Montreal-based Tungle has gone around asking such tech luminaries as Robert Scoble, Don Dodge, Ellen Levy, and Ed Brill about what they think the Calendar of the Future should look like. Paired with an intro video, Tungle has wrapped an entire site around this premise with interviews with tech influencers on various facets of how we use (and don’t) calendars to schedule our lives.

I remember first trying Tungle when it was in pre-private beta (back in my Blognation Canada/Maple Leaf 2.0 days) and honestly I fell out of using it. I revived my Tungle.me profile this morning while working on this story and wow it has come a long way since those early days. If you haven’t used Tungle before, here is the idea. You have a bunch of people (or even one) that you need to schedule a meeting with. We all know what kind of special hell that is, especially when one or two people are extremely busy, so what Tungle does is to map out when everyone looks like they are available and suggests potential meetings. You can mark some people as required and others as optional (i.e. They if they can’t make a time, they aren’t a show stopper) then find the times that fit. Amazingly cool, simple and subtly effective.

Now Tungle is asking the bigger question:

We haven’t messed with the idea of how we use calendars in years (centuries?), we have all this tech now, so can we make it better?

After watching the intro video, one thing is for sure, Tungle has some heavy hitters thinking about the idea. Now, will it catch on? Can we really rethink how we use our calendars or are we just going to wind up stuffing more data into them? My take is that Tungle certainly has the people to do it, but I don’t think people are really ready for the jump yet. There is something very simple about how we use calendars now. Yes, I agree, it would be great to put more information in behind the scenes to be able to drill down when I need to, but over all I often just need to know if my wife or I are busy at a particular time. However…if part of the goal of the Calendar of the Future is to get people thinking about how they manage their time and calendars and start trying/using Tungle (it is free after all), well I think that will be a smashing success.