Gmail make event invitations a default on new emails: one step closer to the ideal web calendar

Gmail has just made it easier to organise events over email. Google Calendar (or G-Cal as its fans like to call it) is now an integral part of the compose email screen. “Insert: Invitation” is now a default option next to “Attach a File”.

I’m pretty excited. There still isn’t a great, free, web-based calendar and while this is hardly a web-wide solution it does make me slightly more likely to use Google Calendar. It’s just one click away now, not two.

Currently I find events and diaries are split up across the net – and it’s a bit annoying: I find social events end up on Facebook events, a mixture of social and work stuff I manage to input into my phone’s calendar and then occasionally I use Google Calendar if I want to invite one of my gmail contacts.

What would be lovely is something that could sync all three plus any other events calendars up there. The ideal calendar would also have different views.

In fact, since the difficulty of organising events online is a bit of a personal bugbear, I’m going to do another story on this right now. In the meantime here’s another exciting screengrab of what that invite in email looks like – streamlined eh?