Who are your real friends?

Find out who you met this year using your Google Calendar data

tl;dr: See your data at frequent-friends.herokuapp.com

Earlier this week, in the spirit of the new year, I was reflecting on which friends I meet with most these days. It’s a relatively small set. Where were all the people I was hanging out with a year ago? As I recalled various friends who’d moved away, grew apart, or who I moved away from, I realized that a more automated approach might give me more detail than my sparse recollections.

I’m a heavy Google Calendar user. I even make events for when I cut my own hair so I can track how long it’s been since the last one. I decided to count up how frequently I invited people to events and use that as a proxy for how important they were to me. After all, actions speak louder than words.

After building it, I tried slicing by month and by year and found that year was much more useful for me. There was a long tail of people I only met with once, and many who were part of events with many attendees. There were some I met with often in the first half of the year, and then completely missed in the second half. I’ve reached out to a few I’ve been missing, and hope to catch up with more soon!

Potential enhancements:

• Facebook event integration
• Filter events with too many people
• Filter recurring events (but in a granular way)
• Date range selector

If you found this useful and like any of these ideas, send me a pull request!