Long rumored . . . Here it is. SiliconBeat has a brief overview and analysis. Chris Sherman from Search Engine Watch has a detailed write-up. And here's more from Search Engine Journal.
It integrates Gmail and has a bunch of sharing features — you can see the calendars of friends/colleagues, which continues Google's move toward social media. The event publishing feature is also quite interesting. And of course there's mobile integration.
The consensus so far seems to be positive. I don't know yet how this compares to Outlook, but it obviously is an alternative and if it doesn't already integrate with Google's Personalized Homepage (GPH), it soon will. That makes GPH more like MyYahoo! (and more of a threat to MyYahoo!) than it was yesterday.
This is just another useful Google tool that, together with the toolbar, desktop search, GPH and Gmail, is building a product bundle whose elements individually and collectively reinforce usage of the others — and, more importantly, Google search. For example, it's quite unlikely that a person would use Google's toolbar, desktop search and, now calendar, and then use MSN as her primary search engine.
I'll offer my own thoughts after I have a chance to play with it.
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More from John Battelle, Charlene Li and the WSJ (sub. req'd).
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