There's lots of action in the online calendar world. A fair amount of it gets brought to my attention, which is lots of fun.

• Ted pointed me to Mosuki, and I hope to meet some of the creators shortly. It's more oriented towards personal calendars than the other sites but it does allow you to share.
  
• I met Brian Dear a few months ago and heard about EVDB. Now that it's announced, I can talk to others about it too. Scraping sites for event and venue information sounds like a really valuable service.
• Kragen Sitaker showed me a del.icio.us-like calendar site that seemed pretty cool. Rather than try to scrape every page, his demo let the user pick certain text, send it to the demo site and it would turn that text into an event (pulling out date, time and location if it could) on your calendar.
• Brian posts about Upcoming, a public events site with feeds to let you know about event categories you're interested in, and a way to add events you want to your personal calendar. It has a HTTP/iCalendar interface that allows users to synch into iCal. According to del.icio.us, upcoming is the biggest new thing with hundreds of bookmarks.
• So far, Trumba's newly announced OneCalendar gets a rather less enthusiastic response. Trumba consists of several ex-Visio guys according to their press release, and like EVDB they have high-powered investors so expect some noise. Already you can synch with Outlook which has got to be a highly desired feature.
  
• Of course, we are working on some of the same stuff too, only with a federated server approach. When you share your calendar with Chandler you can share it on any WebDAV or CalDAV server (see also recent article). We're working on a WebUI for such shared calendars so that the calendar owner or their friends can view the shared calendar or individual events just by going to the URL in the browser. We may do tagging just like everybody else, too.

So far I don't use any of these, there isn't quite enough "there" there, whether it's users I want to share with or features I need. My calendar is in iCal, stored locally, and I don't even share it with anybody, though I do share one other person's iCal calendar. But I don't think that isolation will last long given the exploding options.

I wonder what Yahoo, Google and Microsoft are going to do in this space? Yahoo has more of the world's calendar info than any other site at this moment, because of its excellent support for group calendars. What will Yahoo do with that data? If it does not expand its features soon, possibly allowing users to synch up calendar data on the site with their client software, Yahoo will soon see its calendar data decay and vanish. As for the two gorillas, I really don't have any idea whether they will buy, innovate, or crush.

In response to my last post, Mark pointed out that .NET's HTTPClient supports pipelining. Heikki said that Mozilla put in support for this but it isn't turned on normally because so few servers support it. Furthermore, Heikki reports that tests showed only a 7% performance increase when Mozilla uses pipelining. The Mozilla FAQ is a good start for information on this though it doesn't have the data.

The application I had in mind (Chandler) does more synchronization than browsing over HTTP/WebDAV. For example, if the user decides to work offline, and while offline moves a bunch of resources from one collection to another, then goes online again, Chandler would have to issue one MOVE request for each moved resource. With pipelining, Chandler could theoretically fire each request off and wait to start seeing the responses come back in order over the same connection. The only thing limiting throughput is the bandwidth and MOVE requests and responses don't take up that much. Without pipelining, Chandler has to wait for each response before sending the next request. Now this work is limited by latency, multiplied by the number of resources being moved.

Still, I don't consider this proof that pipelining would be useful. It would be great to see more data one of these days -- assuming, of course, that there really is a performance problem in the first place.

Are there any open source HTTP client libraries that support pipelining? Are there any open source libraries that solve an isomorphic problem with a different protocol? So far I'm not turning up anything but this is the kind of thing that is a little hard to Google for.

At the gym last night I was lifting weights and a man started this converstaion.

Man: "What are you going to do with all those muscles? Beat up the boys?"
Me: "Yup."
Man: "Well then, stay away from me.

What am I supposed to make of that? Seriously, I'm asking here.

... So this hat doesn't fit me. The question is, would it fit a guy with a size 7 3/4 head? Joe, you might or might not want to click through :)