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Jul. 18th, 2011
Facebook Events and Google Calendar
Jul. 18th, 2011 08:58 pmI use Google Calendar as my general calendar tool.
It's great - and it happily imports ical files from elsewhere, which is dead handy. Especially as you can export your Facebook events in ical format.
And as I have an Android phone, which syncs to Google, this means that I can get my facebook events on my phone's calendar.
However... Facebook marks "Private" events with the Private flag. Which makes sense.
But Google Calendar then fails to give you _any_ information on the calendar display for private events, and just says "Busy". Which is fuck all use to anyone. And seeing as you can open the same ical file in a text editor and see the information, not actually a security/privacy feature at all.
Thankfully, some lovely people have put up a page that helps with this. If you go here and put in your Facebook events link then it will produce a _new_ ical URL that can be put into Google Calendar.
Now, this is arguably a big security hole itself - because you're passing your calendar data through a third party. But frankly, I don't give a toss. If it's the kind of thing that bothers you then don't do it. And I'm sure that some of you can handily knock up your own bit of php (or whatever) to do this if you wanted to. If you _do_ do that, then let me know, because I'm sure plenty of people would like to have it.
It's great - and it happily imports ical files from elsewhere, which is dead handy. Especially as you can export your Facebook events in ical format.
And as I have an Android phone, which syncs to Google, this means that I can get my facebook events on my phone's calendar.
However... Facebook marks "Private" events with the Private flag. Which makes sense.
But Google Calendar then fails to give you _any_ information on the calendar display for private events, and just says "Busy". Which is fuck all use to anyone. And seeing as you can open the same ical file in a text editor and see the information, not actually a security/privacy feature at all.
Thankfully, some lovely people have put up a page that helps with this. If you go here and put in your Facebook events link then it will produce a _new_ ical URL that can be put into Google Calendar.
Now, this is arguably a big security hole itself - because you're passing your calendar data through a third party. But frankly, I don't give a toss. If it's the kind of thing that bothers you then don't do it. And I'm sure that some of you can handily knock up your own bit of php (or whatever) to do this if you wanted to. If you _do_ do that, then let me know, because I'm sure plenty of people would like to have it.
