Twitcal

I've been working with a new service called Twitcal. It's a good idea: link a calendar to twitter. You put various upcoming events on a calendar (in gCal, say), and, as you browse through that day's events in Twitcal you can tweet them at the touch of a button. (It syncs to the other calendar too, which is nice). This is great, but what I think of when I think of calendar x twitter is scheduling tweets: setting it so that when the "Dalry Used Car Rally" kicks off on the first of the month, Twitcal sends off some sort of tweet that lets your readers know. It doesn't currently do this. Every tweet has to be done by hand.

To be sure, for some users this is probably a good thing. For them the question is which of their events to tweet and which not. But it would seem to make more sense to have the 'tweet when this event starts/ends' (with perhaps an option of a daily tweet while it is running), available for each event. I hope this feature will be added soon.

One thing Twitcal also does is to send details of the event to recipients. This means that it sends an email about the event to addresses you choose, with an attached .ics if the recipient wants to subscribe to your calendar. All well and good, but this would be more worthwhile if I were able to configure what this email says, (and again, whether it gets sent at the beginning, end or daily throughout an event's lifespan). At the moment it sends an email daily, and the content needs some translation work as well as containing lots of unnecessary/badly formatted information. Also, the .ics attachment is fine for most situations, but not all, as we will see.

What I wanted to do with this feature (but couldn't, really) was to send the email to my blog, using my blog's submit-via-email address. This would have been great: events I had put in my calendar would blog themselves. And if Twitcal had provided a link to the .ics as well as or instead of the attachment, my readers could subscribe that way. (A link would be subscribable, even when the attachment, sent in this example to a blog, not a person's inbox, doesn't show up.)

Twitcal has the potential to do a lot of automated blogging and tweeting for me, if they can just clear up these points. I think it's a great service with a lot of potential, though.