As Ken Norton, Google's product manager for Google Calendar, told us yesterday, the Calendar team decided to tackle this problem after realizing how much time administrative assistants spend on trying to reschedule meetings every day. Starting today, Smart Rescheduler will be available as a Calender Labs product for all Google Calender users (including all Google Apps users with access to Calendar Labs).

Now, assuming your team uses Google Calendar, you can simply click on "Find a new time" and Google will present you with a list of the most appropriate times for a new meeting. The algorithm will rank alternative times based on criteria like attendees, schedule complexity, conference rooms and time zones. As Norton told us, the algorithm is actually quite complex and will also suggest a new meeting time when two participants in a larger meetings are scheduled for a one-on-one meeting at the same time or when there is a scheduling conflict but a meeting participant hasn't RSVPed to this other meeting yet.

Users can also refine the search criteria by changing the meeting duration, ignoring certain conflicts and by setting the earliest and latest date for the rescheduled meeting.

It's interesting that Google is only using this algorithm to reschedule meetings for now. It would also be interesting to see how well this system would work for scheduling meetings in the first place.

For a one-time fee of $5, you can get a URL that allows anyone to view your desktop in their browser with a Java Applet, something most people have, so no download should be required. That URL will work for 24 hours. The smoothness of the transmission was excellent in our testing, something that bigger bulkier solutions can rarely deliver on. WebEx, for example, is a huge business - but the user experience is not a lot of fun.

Pocket Meeting is very lightweight but it does what it claims to do and it does it quickly. It's also easy to switch screens and turn viewers into presenters. That's really nice. We had about 20 people viewing a screen at one time and it worked well, though the company says the technology is best for serving up to 10 people. You can choose to follow the presenter's cursor or navigate around on your own.

There's no chat or voice, and navigation between screens could be clearer. Viewing meetings over a Blackberry Bold is a beta option, though without voice or chat we're not sure how useful that will be. We'd also really like to see a PayPal option enabled for payment instead of credit card. The service is a product of a Texas design firm called Warb, which isn't a firm we're familiar with.

We've been using Yuuguu for screensharing with small groups, DimDim for larger groups. Neither of those is as lightweight and smooth as Pocket Meeting, but they are much more full-featured. In most cases, we'd choose smooth over features.

This product has some more development it needs to go through, but there's promise here and we'd love a quick, smooth solution to this nagging, unfilled need.

If you want to share your screen with someone while talking to them on the phone, this could be a quick, pleasing way to do it.

Using TimeBridge for the first time, we found it fast and easy to use. After creating a test meeting with conference call and web meeting support, we had a little fun chatting for a few minutes on the phone. Overall, we found the service to be quick, easy and on par with other conference services like GoToMeeting and WebEx. Of course, this becomes a lot less surprising when you realize that TimeBridge does not offer an 800 number - it is a long-distance call for (almost) everyone who wants to dial.

The Web Conference module impressed us quite a bit. It supports whiteboard, desktop, document and web page sharing, as well as automatic detection of a webcam. There is a chat pane as well as an attendee management page for the presenter. Transferring control to a different presenter is supported, and if necessary taking control back. New attendees can be added without their having to have a TimeBridge login. Overall we thought the web conference experience was great.

Unfortunately, the options for the phone conference were somewhat limited. People are announced as they join a call - which is fine - but anyone is allowed to speak during the call, and there doesn't seem to be a way to 'end' the call once it is done. This may be OK for an impromptu business meeting or for involving remote employees, but it would be inadequate if you wanted to hold a shareholders meeting or other larger event that requires selective muting of callers.

Overall, we think that for $8.95 a month, you could do worse than what TimeBridge is offering. If you are already hooked on their multiple-suggested-times approach to meeting scheduling, you may find this addition very worthwhile.

What are activity streams all about? People are taking actions and publishing content on a wide variety of websites these days; pulling all that data together, with a variety of different permission levels for viewing and different types of data, is much easier said than done. Just like a standard size of railroad track helped the trains get across the US like they had never done before (thus opening a new era of commerce and communication) so to do all these social media signals need some common format standards to travel from one website to another. Thought leader Chris Messina explains it all quite succinctly in this video from a related meeting over the holidays.

For a detailed summary of last night's meeting on this topic and some good background links, see Comcast's John McCrea's liveblogging of the session.

The hot debates were how to handle media files in activity feed streams and some tension between the big, more proprietary social networks like Facebook and the small, radically open projects like DiSo, the Distributed Social Networking Project.

Any disagreement aside, though, we find it pretty remarkable that all these heavy hitters are sitting at the same table, along with a variety of small startups, to talk about the future of online community and conversation in the form of activity streams. Activity streams are already a big deal, but if these conversations can be fruitful, the results will be as big as the point in history when customers of different email providers became able to email each other or different telephone company customers became able to call each others' phones.

Unlike those historic transformations, though, much of the planning for this one is being done out in the open. Not just through open public meetings like last night's, but thanks to live mobile video, live blogging with comments and microblogging technologies, this conversation can include the participation of anyone in the world.