You read that right. Google Calendar is finally—finally!—live. Somewhat surprisingly, it's dropped the "CL2" moniker it had during development, and very unsurprisingly the logo says BETA. Brad Hill over at the Unofficial Google Weblog has written up a nice review of Google Calendar in which he says "it rocks," it's "brain-dead simple to use," and "as of today I have used Yahoo! Calendar for the last time." I've given it a few pokes and though it would be perhaps too bold of me to predict that Google Calendar will do for web-based calendars what Gmail did for webmail, I will say that it's a great piece of work and suddently Yahoo! has a lot of catching up to do. Head over to TUGW for Brad's full review or go straight to calendar.google.com to get started. That is, as long as the site's not completely hosed by the time you read this.

Another piece of Google's fabled web-based office suite falls into place with the big G's acquisition of Writely, the web-based word processor that we (and everyone else) have been keeping an eye on since its beta launch last year. To refresh your memory, Writely is the flagship product of Upstartle and lets people collaboratively write and edit documents in their web browser. Writely shares its category with heavy hitter 37signals' Writeboard, Zoho Writer, and many more that seem to be popping up weekly. As Om Malik points out, Google has Gmail and its upcoming CL2 calendar app poised to replace Outlook and Google Base has the potential to replace the likes of Access, so all that's missing for a complete Voltron office suite is a spreadsheet app and a PowerPoint-killer.

Not only does Google want to own all your data, Google wants you to plan your life on a Google platform.  As Google says, we must follow, right?  Well, on both points, Google's intentions have remained a closely guarded secret until this week.  Those as lofty as the Wall Street Journal reported on the PowerPoint mixup that exposed Google's file storage plans.  Now we have leaked screenshots of the super-secret "CL2", or Google Calendar.  Techcrunch scored the screens and they seem to validate that Google is building a expansive calendaring capability to augment the GMail platform.  Like all things Google, the interface looks spartan, but heavily splashed with AJAX.  It is also speculated that CL2 is a while away from gracing us lowly users.  Until then, you'll have to plan your life on something else, like with a pen on paper or your hand.

Just when you thought the Google Calendar rumors were dead, here's a brand new one: Calendar is alive (though not live) and it's called Google CL2. This according to blogger Paul Stone, who says he went poking around in Gmail's scripts and found a mysterious something called Google Links. What's that, you ask? It looks like something Google has in the works that will give you quick access to all of Google's services--Gmail, Blogger, Reader, orkut, and so on--by putting a customizable set of links in the corner of every Google page when you're logged in. That's kind of interesting in itself, but according to Stone's screenshots one of the links you can add is to Google CL2, "A calendar for you and the world." That little tagline suggests a social calendar along the lines of Upcoming.org (purchased by Yahoo! last year) or 30 Boxes. The URL for CL2, google.com/cl2, leads to a login page that doesn't work, which is more than we get from calendar.google.com. This all begs the question, though: what happened to CL1?