Once you’ve activated Sneak Preview (assuming you have access to it), whenever you create a new event you’ll see a new viewing mode that displays a calendar alongside your event details. This calendar will show the schedules of each of the people you’ve invited to the event (provided you’re a friend or coworker with access to that information), and the proposed time for your event will appear as a semi-transparent blue box so you can quickly see where you might have conflicts. You can click each guest’s name to show/hide them on the calendar if some are more important than others.

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Want to keep track of Yankees games, Bristol Rugby matches, or the schedule of the Taiwan Beer team (for all of you fans of the Taiwanese Super Basketball League out there)? Now you can subscribe to the schedules of your favorite professional sports teams on Google Calendar. Just click on “Add other calendars” in the left-hand column and browse “interesting calendars.”

Google just added sports calendars for football, baseball, basketball, rugby, hockey and soccer. It also released a few other features today, including the ability to add birthday reminders for your contacts. If you have their birthdays in Gmail contacts or it is in their Google profiles (we all have one of those, right), then it will automatically populate your calendar with their birthdays.

Google Calendar Labs also has two new features. Meetings that are scheduled on a repeated basis can be dimmed in the calendar. Those weekly staff meetings are so much background noise anyway. And now any Google Gadget can be added to your calendar.

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Google Calendar now has its own Labs. Long one of the most popular features of Gmail, at least among the early adopter crowd, Labs is the tab in Settings where users can find and turn on experimental new features. Google Calendar Labs is launching with six features:

1. Background Image (now you can change it)
2. Attach a Document (to an event)
3. World Clock (see what time it is for the person you are trying to schedule a meeting with across the world)
4. Jump To Date (quick time-based navigation)
5. Next Meeting (shows how much time is left before your next one)
6. Free or Busy (shows the status if your friends and co-workers)

If you don’t yet see the Labs setting, it should be rolling out gradually across all Google Calendar users.

In conjunction with the rollout of Google Calendar Labs, Google is also opening up new APIs for developers to change the Google Calendar interface. Google Calendar can act as a gadget container complete with hooks into OpenSocial apps and OAuth authentication, or apps can be written as new sidebar features. The new Labs features were written using the gadget API. Maybe someone will write a Google Calendar app like Facebook events which makes it easy to organize and add events to your calendar directly from Gmail, or better yet, Facebook.

What new features would you like to see come out of Google Calendar Labs?

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In January, Google released an offline version of Gmail based on Google Gears. Last month, it began offering an offline version of Google Calendar to enterprise app customers. Today, the rest of us get to try the offline calendar, which is also based on Google Gears.

Once you click on the “Offline” link at the top of the page, the application asks you once to enable Google Gears for the Calendar. After you do that, it allows you to read your calendar when you are not connected to the Internet. A Calendar icon appears on your desktop. When you click on it, your browser opens up to show your recent schedule (it only goes back a month). For the most part, the offline version is read-only. You cannot edit existing entries until are back online. However, you can add new entries.

There are obviously some syncing issues going on here, but it seems that Google should be able to figure out how to let you edit your calendar and then sync once you are connected. Without that ability, it is a hampered product. But it is still better than no offline access whatsoever.

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After announcing the offline feature for Gmail last week, Google allowed another feature to be viewed offline: Google Calendar. Unfortunately, the masses will have to wait for access. The offline access, which was built using Google Gears, is currently only available to users of business software package, Google Apps.

While the offline feature for calendars offers read-only access for enterprise users, it’s not nearly as useful as offline Gmail, where users can write and save emails that will be sent once online. The new offline calendar application doesn’t allow you to create, edit or delete events.

So what’s the next feature to join the offline party? And when will Google let consumers use the offline calendar?

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Upon opening a Jiffle calendar, users are presented with a schedule of their associate’s availability. With a few clicks, a new appointment can be created in a manner that will come naturally to anyone who’s used a standard calendar application.

Jiffle believes that its application could be a boon to participants in Google’s Adwords program. After clicking on an appealing ad, consumers will no longer have to call customer support or sales representatives to schedule appointments – they can simply add themselves into an available time slot. Jiffle also thinks that Cisco’s WebEx could be used in conjunction with the service to further expedite meetings.

There are some strong competitors to Jiffle, including TimeBridge, which already supports Google Calendar. TimeBridge also helps facilitate group meetings through use of a point system, which allows users to vote on their preferred times. We expect to see other major developments in this space very soon.

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Dave Winer may have been the first to write about it on Scripting.com. CNET also has a story.

My first impression – It’s fast, slick and stable. Calendar is Ajax driven and, as I mentioned, very fast. Adding an event is as easy as typing “Dinner with Keith tomorrow at 8pm” and Calendar structures the data properly and places a correct calendar entry. This entry can be dragged around the screen to a new day or time.

The Key features:

• Text recognition – In adding an event, or detecting a new event from Gmail, Calendar automatically detects event-specific words and suggests the adding of a new event with data auto-structured.
• Manage Multiple Calendars – set up multiple calendars (work, personal, etc) and view them separately or together.
• Heavy Gmail integration – Gmail recognizes when messages include event information, so when you get emailed about an event, you can add it to Google Calendar with just a couple clicks. Google Calendar links on the right side of the Gmail page.
• Sharing – Calendars can be shared with others, and you can subscribe to others’ shared calendars. Read/write permissions can be granted on a per user basis. Calendars can be published via a web page or via RSS, so readers do not need to be on the Google Calendar platform.
• Importing – You can import events from other calendar programs, including Yahoo Calendar and Microsoft Outlook. Click “Settings,” then “Import Calendar”.
• Calendar Search

The key driver of Google Calendar is clearly going to be the Gmail integration. For users of Gmail’s web interface, it will be extremely easy to keep track of Calendar items on Google as well.

My overall impression: Excellent. The ability to share via web publishing or RSS shows Google’s commitment to an open stardard. And this application is impressive in its speed and stability.

Screen Shots:

I am now in possession of screenshots from Google’s long delayed new Ajax calendar application, which will be called “CL2″ (the CL2 login screen is here). It was only a matter of time before someone broke down and leaked these – as far as I know these screen shots are the first on the public web. Previous ones were almost certainly photoshopped fakes. These are real.

Om Malik also recently posted with some additional details and has been trying to track down more information. Now we have it.

Here is the default view of Google’s new CL2 Calendar:

There have been leaks before today, however. Rumor has it that one of the beta testers provided credentials to Yahoo…although Yahoo notified Google (after a thorough review of the product I suppose).

The closed beta is ongoing with about 200 participants – people involved are not allowed to invite outsiders to see the calendar and are under strict rules not to share any details with outsiders. Based on feedback I am getting, CL2 is a long way away from launch.

About CL2

CL2 makes it easy — even effortless — to keep track of all the events in your life and compare them to what your friends and family have going on in theirs. We’ve designed a calendar that works for you — helping you add events from email, friends, and other public calendars — so you don’t have to spend all your time maintaining your schedule. CL2 even helps you discover new events you might be interested in. We think it’s a great tool for managing your daily schedule, keeping track of what everyone in your family is doing, organizing events for a club or team, or creating public events that you can promote to the world.

CL2 is closely, very closely, integrated with Gmail. It includes now-standard web 2.0 features – Ajax, subscription feeds for integration with iCal and other desktop calendars, event creation, search, sharing, notifications (including SMS) and more.

It’s also clear from the event creation functionality that Google is is going to attempt to aggregate events like eventful and zvents do now. If they combine their event creation feature with a web crawl and parsing of event data (exactly what zvents does), they will be able to create a very large events database. From the CL2 Trusted Tester Guidelines:

Creating Events

You can create events on your calendar in a number of ways.

Click ‘Create Event.‘ This brings you to the create event page, where you can enter information about your event.

Click on Quick Add (or type the letter Q). Quick Add gives you a text box where you can type all the information about your event in normal English, and we’ll fill out the form for you. We’re pretty excited about this feature, so please let us know how it works for you.

Drag-to-create. If you’re looking at the day where you want to create an event on your calendar, just click and drag your mouse from the desired start time to the end time. Once you’ve selected your time range, you can just choose a title for your new event.

Event Pages

Whenever you create an event, we create a web page which you’ll see when you click on the “more details” link on any event. This web page is only visible to you, unless you’ve invited other people to your event or made the event public, in which case you can use the page to share information about the event with people who are attending or the public at large. Note: you don’t have to be a CL2 user to be able to see event pages, so you can use these pages to share information with anyone involved with the event, regardless of what online tools (if any) they use. (Ever wish your favorite local band would learn how to use HTML and publish their calendar? Once we get your feedback and open CL2 to the world you can help them do just that.)

I am not going to publish the full guidelines because there is information included around becoming a tester that I feel is inappropriate for public disclosure.

Overall, CL2 is a very impressive product. The tight integration with Gmail will make that an even more compelling product. Other online calendar applications are going to have a very hard time competing.

Additional Screen Shots: