Calendar

Recently I wrote that newspapers (all of them online) would become extremely local to your family. CNN had a similar article recently, but what they call hyperlocal is your community, not your family. So that isn't nearly local enough in my view.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/05/01/future.online.news.hyperlocal/index.html?iref=t2test_techtues
Moreover, I think the family calendar is the organizing principle into which all external information should flow. I want the kids' school schedules for sports and plays and even lunch choices to automatically flow into the home calendar. And when I want to decide what to do on the weekend, I want to click on the date for next Saturday and have all the relevant choices of plays, movies, and events pop up. Everything you do has a time dimension. If you are looking for a new home, the open houses are on certain dates, and certain houses that fit your needs are open at certain times. If you are shopping for some particular good, you often need to know the store hours. Your calendar needs to know your shopping list and preferences so it can suggest good times to do certain things.Time is closely related to distance. On a typical night, for a typical family, there is much driving to and fro to deliver people and goods to where they need to be. Sometimes it is more complicated than a Fedex route. It would be nice if the family calendar helped us plan the shortest routes to accomplish all goals. The calendar just needs to know what I need and when, then plan which family member with a car is nearest.Perhaps your calendar could suggest some carpooling as well, all automatically. I don't need to know my friends' business, but if their calendars and mine spoke to each other and found some common driving patterns it could shoot us both an offer to carpool, assuming we had approved those friends in advance for such offers. My phone would get the offer and I could confirm with a simple text message response.When I read the news, I'm generally most interested in how stories have unfolded across time. I want to know the "new news," as in the topics that have never been reported until today, but I also want ongoing charts and graphs about the "old news" such as wars and the economy. My understanding of the war in Iraq, for example, has little to do with what blew up today and a lot to do with the trend lines over the entire war. In other words, I see the news in terms of time.In most families, everyone keeps their own calendar and does a spotty job of sharing what's on it with everyone else. In time that calendar coordination will happen electronically. And most of the information will come from external sources, such as your schools, clubs, and organizations to which you belong.Some time ago I blogged that advertising belongs in your electronic calendar, for your benefit more than for the advertiser. That's because my interest and desire in certain products and services is linked to timing. If my calendar has a certain birthday coming up in a week, and I've checked the boxes saying the person is a certain age and gender, or has certain hobbies, my calendar can start giving me gift suggestions and recommending online flowers and e-cards and the like. In other words, advertisements can move from nuisance to valuable service just by adjusting when you see them.I think the biggest software revolution of the future is that the calendar will be the organizing filter for most of the information flowing into your life. You think you are bombarded with too much information every day, but in reality it is just the timing of the information that is wrong. Once the calendar becomes the organizing paradigm and filter, it won't seem as if there is so much.