kate hollenbach

This was all over tech news headlines today, but Google is finally supporting IMAP for Gmail. I’m excited about this for a couple of reasons — first, it means that I can finally back up all the e-mail I’ve sent over the last couple years or so since I started using Gmail. I love Gmail, and I can’t imagine going back to an email client with less support for viewing e-mail threads, but I’ve always been a little uncomfortable with all that personal data living only on Google’s servers. The other reason I’m excited about this is that it opens up some new possibilities for me to play with visualizing e-mail again. When I was working on Emdash I used my MIT e-mail account for testing, so I was missing over a year’s worth of sent messages. Now that I can access those messages easily with an IMAP interface, I have some data I can use to start working on visualizing two-way e-mail communication. And I can use E15 to do it. I’m psyched.

I promise not every entry on this blog will be a plug for one of the Google apps, but I recently started using the shared items feature in Google Reader. You can browse my shared items or subscribe to them in your RSS reader of choice (I hear Google Reader is nice). What you can expect from my shared items: visualizations, some design essays, pictures, and sadly, probably some lolcats.

As the title to this post suggests, you can use Google Calendar to share calendars by embedding them on your own webpage! This feature has actually existed in Calendar for a while, but this summer I worked on a new version of the embeddable calendars with fellow intern Mike Fitzgerald and our host, Michael Bolin . The new embeddable calendars use Javascript and are a lot more interactive than their HTML-only predecessors. Plus, they look a lot more like the full version of Calendar, and the agenda view has been redesigned to be (I hope!) a little more useful.

The embeddable views are used within Google Calendar to show previews of public calendars, but you can also use the Embeddable Calendar Helper to share your own calendars. The helper will generate some HTML that you can put in your own webpage to embed a calendar (or two, or more). Here is an example using public calendars for election 2008 events:

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In addition to showing the calendars, the embeddable views also make it easy for viewers to subscribe to new calendars (using the button in the bottom right hand corner). I’d love it if my classes did this for assignments so I wouldn’t have to enter everything by hand — if you’re an MIT student taking 6.UAT this term, you’re in luck . I should probably also mention that less detailed calendars for other MIT courses (lectures/recitations only) are available at wikicalendars.com . Enjoy!