BrainStream: The e-Family Calendar

[bkdelong]

I've been playing around with various online calendar and address book services and getting frustrated at having to keep everything in synch with the family paper calendar. I've been peripherally participating in the microformats project which involves contextually marking up date-related information in HTML. It's an incredibly nifty idea especially since several of the major search engines are looking to index this semantically defined information.

Anyway, I was thinking about the developments of ePaper and thin clients - why not create one that has an 802.11a/b/g card, a bluetooth card, has compatibility with vcard and icalendar/vcalendar and the ability to synchronize with various online services through API plugins. The user-interface would be via a stylus of some sort and it would be the size of a calendar except no need to get a new one every year - simply download a set of standards-based calendar "skins", doing whatever the heck you want. Anytime you add an event, it simply uploads it to the service of your choice and stays synchronized with that. If each of the family members have different calendar services of choice then you create accounts with those services and set your calendar to synchronize with all of them.

The same can be done with an address book and contact list - perhaps it can connect and synchronize with all these damn social networks out there as well.