Jananas

I recently received an evite to a Thanksgiving dinner some of my classmates were holding. I was flabbergasted. An evite? Seriously? As if I’m really going to log into a completely separate service to rsvp. Worse, they used our school e-mail addresses, so it would have meant re-registering with the service. I declined due to inappropriate use of old technology (that and I already had plans).

I spent some time thinking about why I was so annoyed by the evite. The real reason is that Facebook does a much better job of organizing events and friends. In fact, I think that a large portion of why Facebook took off so quickly amongst my friends was the events functionality. But there are still minor irritations with the Facebook service – mainly that once you accept (or maybe accept) an event,  you still need to open the calendar program of your choice and create an entry. If you don’t, you risk forgetting, double booking, or otherwise just being a jerk to friends who thought you’d be there.

I think that a solution is simple. Facebook can send a meeting invite, with event details, to your e-mail address whenever you accept (or maybe accept) an event. The meeting invite could initially be built to work with the most common calendar programs (so say Outlook and Google calendar). When you accept the meeting invite, your calendar automatically updates with event details. To make the idea better, it should be dynamic such that whenever the Facebook event changes, the event in your calendar should update to reflect the new information.

Not 100% sure on how technologically feasible this is, but I do believe that it the sort of behind the scenes upgrade that will add value for users. Major problem? As far as I can tell the idea isn’t monetizable.