Awesome birthday management using Google Calendar!

Do you use any calendar service for personal use? Most people don't. But if you ever wanted to get birthday reminders of your contacts without putting any effort, you should start using Google Calendar.

Instead of asking your contacts to manually enter their birthday into some awful birthday reminder service, you can have their birthdays automatically pulled from your social network into Google calendar. This is just a one-time setup and you don't have to do anything afterwards to keep it up-to-date as you expand your social network, it will always be in sync. This also means that you don't have to bother your friends with "I'm setting up a birthday calendar and need your help" mails, you automatically get birthdays of those contacts who have shared it on your social network.

While Orkut has this feature built-in, Facebook has a third-party app which can do this for you. I don't care know about other networks as I don't use them but if you know, please leave a comment. It's also possible to pull birthdays from Google Contacts (i.e. GMail contacts) and less famous Google profile by using this recently added feature in Google Calendar. And for those friends and family members who are not present online, you can manually create recurring entries in Calendar.  

Here is how to setup this:

• To add Orkut birthdays, look for the link highlighted in the image or follow this guide.

• To add Google contact birthdays, follow this link and click on 'More'.

• To add fbCal app on Facebook, follow this link.

Once you've done this, you'll see these calendars embeded in your Google Calendar.

Now here comes the best part. You can have this information always available on your mobile phone! You can enable Google Sync if your device supports it and get all these birthdays on your phone. And if you don't have a high end device, don't worry, you can still get SMS reminders from Google Calendar.

If you have an android device, embed this awesome calendar widget by Quick Calendar on the home screen.

I am already using this setup for the last few months and just loving it. Let me know if you find it useful too.

Coming up next, awesome contact management!