Friends Events Calendar

[mikz]

Title
Friends Events Calendar

Short, concise description of the idea
Add a field to the Update Journal function to specify dates, to be used if the entry is an invitation. Add a calendar function to allow users to see their friends' upcoming events.

Full description of the ideaSee the concise description and implementation detials. The form implied

Comments

[mikz]

Re your first point: I might not have made it clear that each user's calendar would only show their friends' events. This limits the possibility of abuse; if you don't want to see somebody's invitation, take them off your friends list.

I suppose LJ could add an option to apply existing filters to the calendar as well-users who have a filter called 'cool friends' might only want to see their invitations. But since that would tempt users to create new filters by location, LJ ought to also have a location field in the invitation, because people often throw parties when they're abroad. If my Sydney friends created a geographic filter for Sydney they wouldn't include me because I currently live in San Francisco, but I often throw parties when I visit Sydney. With the location field, users could also filter their calendar by geography, e.g. I might want to see all events within 100km of Sydney when it's summer there and or 100 miles of San Francisco when it's summer here.

Re your second point: the whole reason I was thinking of the invitations themselves just being journal entries is to allow people to do this. Is 'trackback' any different from LJ comments?

Thanks for running with this!

[azurelunatic]

'Trackback' is a feature that's somewhere on the implementation list, that semi-automatically links two related entries together. Say I have an insightful post and my roommate links to it in the normal fashion; that link only goes one way, from her journal to my journal.

I don't understand the exact mechanism of trackback exactly myself, but it winds up with a link that goes both ways -- one in the comments/trackback section of the original entry being linked to, and one in the entry that's doing the linking and commentary.

[mikz]

Ah, that does sound pretty useful. By 'the normal fashion', you mean just including a hyperlink in the text of a journal entry? e.g. Check out this cool entry!?

[azurelunatic]

Exactly.

I know it's been on LJ devs' to-do list for a while, so it'll eventually get here, and when it does, this would be a great application for it, assuming this goes through too.

[azurelunatic]

The invitations being journal invitations in themselves could have issues with timing. If their time on the friends page is tied to the posting time, then you'll see it at the time the invitation is made, but not around the time the event is happening. If it's tied to the event time, would it have to use Date Out of Order in order to not cause issues with the rest of the journal entries in the intervening time between now and then? And of course Date Out of Order would make it not show up on the friends page.

Events would probably get lost on the friends page, too, especially in an active friends page.

[mikz]

... but this is entirely the point of having the calendar. Many of my friends write a lot of LJ entries, and many of them organise pretty big events. The events tend to clash because nobody has time to read their entire friends list to look for potential conflicts. I wrote this idea specifically to avoid people from needing to do this; they can look in one place, the calendar, which links to journal entries describing the events. The event date and time is different from the journal entry date and time (hence me specifying the need for an extra field), so timing shouldn't be an issue.