My Social Week: Event Sync and Funny For Money

Synching Facebook Events to my Google calendar

There’s a useful new button on your Facebook Events page called “Export Events” – it lets you save your Facebook events in a format so you can import them into Outlook or your Google Calendar. I tried following the instructions on Inside Facebook and it works really well, would be great if it was automated via Goosync but it’s a good start.

An event as it appears on Facebook

The same event now on Google Calendar

Funny for Money

The Comic Relief App is live- try it here and raise some money for COmic Relief. Try your joke telling skills out and impress your  friends.

Be Funny for Money for Comic Relief

Seamless Calendar Synching at last

As a techie I test drive the various “synchronise my online calendar with mobile phone” approaches.

Generally it’s been an abject failure requiring more tweaking than I’ve had time for so I’ve resorted in 2005, 2006 and 2007 to a highly effective “paper based single user portable calendaring solution” (also known as a Diary).

No longer! I now have an N81 Nokia Phone which is less expensive than the iPhone but still features the Wi-fi capacity I need to keep this cost effective (i.e. free).

For my calendar, I’ve ditched the home grown approaches and got Google Apps to manage my tobyberesford.com email domain. Since most invites and meetings now come over the email, I enter 90% of my engagements into my Google Calendar.

Then I used a cool little product called Goosync (N81 is too new so I used the N80 profile instead), and registered with them. I entered in all my Google domain details in Password Authentication and went to their auto config screen.

They SMS-text-messaged me a config file, which I saved on the phone (automatically it sets up a Sync profile), then I went to Tools Sync GooSync.com – selected my office Wi-fi and Hey Presto all the calendar entries were on my phone. Yippee.

Ok so still a bit of tweaking required…. but a lot easier than last year. Now all I need is a way of synching my Facebook events into my Google Calendar…