Google has spread its interests so wide that it’s hard to keep track of all of them. It's also looks like the company may be jumping from one big project to the other while lacking a very focused goal. At the same time though, several services have always been central to the company. Gmail gets most of the credit and it fully deserves it, Docs has also seen a lot of attention lately, but there's an app which has been around for longer and is just as important though it's often overlooked, Google Calendar. It may not look like it, but it's evolving along with the rest of the apps and has recently introduced a new feature which should make it easier to plan an event that doesn't clash with someone else's plans.

It's called “Sneak Preview” and it allows users to see if the people they're adding to an event have other plans at that time. Google is apparently just testing the feature, so not too many get access to it for the moment. These tests are a regular occurrence at Google and, unless something goes horribly wrong, the feature should be rolled out to everyone soon enough, more or less in its current form.

If you get included in the test, you will have to activate the new feature, it's not enabled by default. Sneak Preview is a pretty big overhaul of the event creation menu, mostly in terms of functionality. The biggest change is the mini-calendar which shows up in the lower part of the window giving users a preview of the calendars of those invited. The new event will show up as a translucent preview which users can move and extend.

Users will be able to select just some of the guests invited so that they show up in the preview, assuming their calendars are public or available to the user in the first place. As usual, there are several versions of the test going around, at least two, and in one of them users get one more new feature, “rooms,” which does pretty much what it implies, it allows users to create rooms for the event to group the guests.