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Comment by callmeed | Hacker News Reader

Calendars & Events as a Service (aka "Stripe for Calendars")

I'm sick of dealing with scheduled events, timezones, future background jobs, etc. in almost every app I build. I want a service with an elegant API and nice libraries that would let me:

* Create multiple calendars (it would have an ID I could then save with my user model or whatever)

* Add events to a calendar by just passing it a timestamp and other metadata

* Have webhooks that get called any time an event starts/stops (possibly also X minutes before)

* Nice API calls for getting all a calendar's events, checking free/busy times, specifying time zone output and strftime formatting, etc.

* A JS library for outputting pretty calendars to an HTML page

* An additional cron-like feature for each calendar allowing you to define recurring webhooks

If anyone wants to give something like this a shot, let me know. I'll be your first customer, partner or angel investor.

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This is interesting. I had an idea a few years back that was a variation of this as a consumer/small business service, rather than a developer one.

The idea (roughly) was predicated on the belief that much information that needs to be communicated in the general sphere of "local" is in the form of calendar events. Everything from community meetings to wine tastings to school events, soccer games, carpool times, and so on, can be communicated in the form of calendar events and their metadata. So the concept was to do a clearinghouse for discovering and subscribing to events and event feeds (which would auto-update when changed and so on) that also made it easy for publishers of events to enter them in a single format (calendar feed, email-to-event, etc) and have them translated into whatever formats were preferred by the end-users.

EDIT: wondering if i just described Upcoming.org...

I find this interesting. Calendars are fun, until you have to program them :P

Just out of curiosity, isn't this already possible with the Google Calendar API?

I haven't looked that deep into the most recent version of G's calendar API. I don't think they have webhooks though.

Actually they do in v3 https://developers.google.com/google-apps/calendar/v3/push

Does it allow you to create Calendar as a data object whenever you want to create one or is it just one calendar associated with one google account ? Because what if I don't want to create google account for my users , just get the calendar functionality.

You can create multiple calendars but they are always associated with a user's google account. You don't want Stripe for calendars, but rather Balanced for calendars. A whitelabel calendar API where you user's dont have to sign up for another service in order to use yours. Correct?

Correct!

I'm working on this (a subset of these features at least) right now. It was going to be an internal tool for my company, but having seen this interest makes me think I might try and go the SaaS route...

This is definitely something I would use. I hate messing with date/time. Timezones, zillions of different date formats, etc. all make dates and times a pain. A slick "Stripe-like" way to handle all of that would be awesome.

I'm considering building something like this. Just to be clear, is converting user input into timestamps part of the problem (and if so, do libraries like http://momentjs.com address it)? Or are you strictly referring to the scheduling aspect of it?

Is this something you would pay for? How much?

Interesting. I was thinking about a very similar calendar API last night. Mostly from a scheduling standpoint. But the webhooks part is a cool addition. Is something similar now possible with zapier?

Doesn't Zapier have to act on some outside event? Or are you saying combine Zapier w/ Google Calendar to solve the webhooks problem?

Sure, you could prob hook it up to gcal. But I thought they may have a timer event as well.

This is so true. Dealing with time-related development features is one of the most annoying things I deal with.

There is this one: http://php.brickhost.com

i'm interested. any other devs want to collab? anon1@alumni.stanford.edu

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