The present invention relates to the field of text messaging and calendaring and, more particularly, to calendar integration with text messaging (e.g., SMS texts) to facilitate no-time-specified events.
People utilize text messaging, or texting, to compose, send, and receive brief electronic messages between two devices, often mobile phones. Text messaging is typically conveyed over a phone network (e.g., using a short messaging service referred to as SMS; using Multimedia Messaging Service referred to as MMS; and the like. By definition, text messaging is a fast, light-weight communication mechanism, which is one of its principle advantages and distinctions over competing technologies, such as email messaging. This light-weight nature means that conventionally there is no integration between a text-messaging application and other applications, which is a situation different from what exists with robust communication systems, like integrated messaging. Robust communication systems often integrate email messaging, with task management, calendaring, and other such functions. These functions are often distinct from each other (yet found in a common application) even though these various functions share the same communication technologies/network (e.g., TCP/IP over an IP network) and utilize the same back-end server.
What is needed is a way to bridge the different communication technologies to make it easier to plan for a time-unspecified future gathering. Specifically, to reduce an end-user overhead to facilitate scheduling without requiring an end-user to take a series of actions across different applications. This would be especially advantageous to short communication mechanisms, like text messaging, where often a user legitimately plans to get together with another, yet fails to follow-up on an initial communication so that no meeting ever takes place, which is a common occurrence.