He posted the concert on a Web calendar that he and Gaines share with a dozen friends, and suddenly both men were using the Internet to organize their social lives. In recent months, a host of companies have introduced services that let consumers use the Web to schedule their days and organize their to-do lists. Once the various calendar providers embrace common communications standards, Web scheduling is expected to join online stock tracking and personalized news feeds as an Internet staple that consumers will keep coming back to. Over time, industry officials expect calendaring to become every bit as essential to consumer's Internet use as search engines are today. Where search engines help consumers harness the vast riches of the Internet into something with personal meaning, Web calendars let computer users start with themselves and then expand outward.
Calendars can be completely private, visible to the entire world, or some combination of the two.
Consumers can use the Web merely to obtain global access to their own personal schedule, or they can create a public calendar of events to which total strangers are invited. For all their promise, none of these services yet offer all the features that make the category promising. Few are more than 2 months old and several are still in pre-release testing. Some are painfully slow and others have bugs to work out. It's clearly a young industry.