But the shared calendar only works if everybody uses it.
There's a network effect.
And so to get the benefit of being able to line all these up,
you need to have everybody use it.
Now, there's lots of ways that you can address the challenges, and
I think different systems have done that in different ways.
One way of addressing the challenge is, is what we see with Doodle.
So Doodle is a web application
that enables you to schedule an individual meeting.
And so if we want to be able to find a couple of free hours to meet this week,
maybe for a dissertation defense it's important to be able to find free time.
All of the people involved may use different calendaring systems or
have preferences about when they prefer to meet or not, and again,
our availability depends on who's asking.
But by putting this in something like Doodle you're asking an answer not
in general are you free, but are you free at this particular time?
Here's another example with Google Calendar where as the Google
infrastructure integrates more and more services,
the cost of being able to keep a shared calendar gets smaller.
The user interface gets easier, the integration gets smoother, and
the benefits start to get larger.
And so even for an individual worker the relationship between those two can flip.
One way that you can see this is by integrating e-mail and calendar.
And so one way of both lowering the friction of using a piece of software,
decreasing the cost and adding value is that we can, by showing my calendar,
in the context of an email that comes in asking about a calendar relevant query.
It makes it a lot easier to answer that.
And so I'm incented to participate and keep things in there.
And then I can just hit a single button to be able to add that to the calendar.
Another challenge of building social software
is being able to handle exceptions.
One thing that is extraordinary about human social interaction
is that people are extremely good at extemporizing and exception handling.
So much so that we often don't realize how much of it we're doing.
We've seen this especially in recent years with regard to medical records.
You don't realize how much extemporizing is going on until you
try to replace it with a system that doesn't allow that kind of extemporizing.