Thursday, March 14, 2013

Google's war on standards: RSS, ActiveSync, now CalDAV

I remember when Google seemed to be somewhat friendly to standards and to the idea of open interchange.

That was, of course, Google 1.0. Now we live with Google 2.0.

With the neglect of Blogger, the end of Google Reader, and the RSS-free launch of G+, Google has put a stake in the RSS/Atom subscription standard. (Google played a big role in the development of Atom, when most of us write of "RSS" we mean "RSS/Atom".)

Recently Google limited support for ActiveSync, a de facto standard based on Microsoft Exchange technologies.

Now Clark reminds me that they've also ended CalDAV support, which I use to view my Google Calendars on my 11" Air:

Official Blog: A second spring of cleaning

... CalDAV API will become available for whitelisted developers, and will be shut down for other developers on September 16, 2013. Most developers’ use cases are handled well by Google Calendar API, which we recommend using instead. If you’re a developer and the Calendar API won’t work for you, please fill out this form to tell us about your use case and request access to whitelisted-only CalDAV API...

I'm glad I never committed to Android. I'm deeply enmeshed in the Google ecosystem, but it is time I started digging out.

1 comment:

Martin said...

I am wondering if BusyCal will continue to work … and I am seriously considering a switch to Office 365 although I have no idea about a possible migration path from Google Apps for Business so far. Office 365 would be more expensive too and data privacy is another issue. In addition, I have no idea why my family members could use for their private calendars and contacts since iCloud still does not offer any advanced way of sharing such data between family members.