New Free-Busy feed for the Google Calendar API

There is now a convenient way to query free-busy information from Google Calendar. The new Google Calendar free-busy feed allows you to query blocks of busy time for one or multiple users, or for all the users subscribed to a Google Group in a single request.

This new Google Data feed is accessible through the URL pattern
https://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/default/freebusy/busy-times/userID
where “userID” is the email of the calendar you’d like to request the free-busy information of. The response will be an entry containing temporal blocks indicating the periods when the user is marked as busy in their Google Calendar. Visit our Developer’s Guide for more details and code samples about the free-busy feed.

You can also query free-busy information for multiple users in a single query using a batch request. The URL to use for such a batch request is:
https://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/default/freebusy/busy-times/batch

Below is a sample batch request, requesting free-busy information for Liz, Bob and Luke:

          http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/default/freebusy/busy-times/liz%40example.com        http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/default/freebusy/busy-times/bob%40example.com        http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/default/freebusy/busy-times/luke%40example.com

This allows you, for example, to find common free time between multiple users in one single request to the Google Calendar API, which was not possible with previously existing feeds.

For example, the response from the batch request above would look like:

  https://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/default/freebusy/batch/1234  2010-03-13T00:00:00.000Z  

      http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/default/freebusy/liz%40example.com     … updated, category, self link, author and batch info ...                                                  http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/default/freebusy/bob%40example.com    … Free-busy entry content for Bob ...        http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/default/freebusy/luke%40example.com    … Free-busy entry content for Luke ...

The response contains an entry for each requested calendar’s free-busy feed. Each of these entries contains blocks of time where the user is marked as busy in his Calendar for the next 24 hours.

Google Apps for Business domain users are also able to query free-busy information for all the members of a given Google Group in a single request. This feature is available through the following URL pattern:
https://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/default/freebusy/group/groupID/busy-times Where “groupID” is the email of the Google Group.

The response will be a feed containing the free-busy entries of each member of the group. To learn more about querying free-busy for groups please visit our Developer’s Guide.

Manymoon – a Google Apps Marketplace success story

When we launched the Google Apps Marketplace less than a year ago the goal was to create a vibrant ecosystem and marketplace for independent third party business applications. Today there are hundreds of applications from developers all over the world using Google Apps Marketplace to sell directly to the 30 million Google Apps users at over 3M businesses and higher education institutions. Manymoon is one of the most popular applications on the Google Apps Marketplace, and this week they were acquired by Salesforce.com. Congratulations to Amit, Manav, Alex, and the entire Manymoon team!

Manymoon began investing in Google Apps integration very early and was one of the early adopters ofthe Google Apps OpenID login feature. They were also one of the first to create a Gmail Contextual Gadget. We worked closely with Manymoon to get their application on the Google Apps Marketplace when we launched last March. Manymoon had immediate success, and quickly became one of most popular applications. Listen to what Manymoon co-founder Amit Kulkarni had to say in a recent interview;

“The results have been fantastic. Since the launch of the Google Apps Marketplace in March, we’ve been signing up as many as 1000 new businesses per week … and that’s with no sales or marketing people in our company. These customers are finding us on their own in the Google Apps Marketplace, adding the app and getting engaged with it.”

“Google Apps Marketplace customers upgrade to a premium edition of Manymoon at a 30% higher rate than non-Google Apps Marketplace customers. The best part, however, is that our monthly registrations increased by 150% since the launch of Google Apps Marketplace. And that’s where the Marketplace really excels, it provides large enough volumes to make the Freemium business model work.”

The Google Developer Relations groups loves to work with developers, and help them build great business applications using Google technologies. The Google Apps Marketplace is there to help them sell their applications directly to Google business customers. There is also the Chrome Web Store for web browser applications, and Android Market for mobile apps.

Manymoon is an excellent success story for Google Apps Marketplace and Google Developer Relations, and a nice testament to the value of integrating product features with Google Apps. We are thrilled with their success and happy to see the founders get a great financial exit with the acquisition by Salesforce.com. Most importantly, we are thrilled to see Salesforce.com’s intentions to invest in growing Manymoon on the Google Apps Marketplace, giving Salesforce a new way to work with Google Apps.

Financial exits are great, but there are many other start-ups building successful businesses on the Google Apps Marketplace. Insightly is another amazing success story. In just 3 months they went from coding an idea on nights and weekends, to a best selling app on Google Apps Marketplace. SlideRocket, Aviary, Tungle, Gist, Smartsheet, Outright, MyERP and many others have experienced dramatic growth since joining the Google Apps Marketplace.

See “How To Get Started” on Google Apps Marketplace for more information. See the Google Developer Relations site for links to technical people who can help you. Visit the Google Support Forums for immediate help and answers to your technical questions. Our job is to help developers build great applications, and provide a vibrant marketplace to sell those applications directly to Google customers. Get started today!