This morning, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published the first public draft of its Calendar API spec, the technical standard by which it recommends applications and calendars share event data. It just so happens that it was exactly 5 years ago to the day today that Google Calendar released its API!

Such data standards make it easier to develop apps that use your calendar data and make more viable the development of new calendar software without fear that users will be locked out of application ecosystems.