First Take: 30 Boxes

I am joining in the chorus of praise for 30 Boxes (along with Scoble, Thomas Hawk (who calls it the best calendar ever), Matt Mullenweg, and Om, who called 30 boxes the gmail of calendars) even though I have only fooled with it for a few hours. I posted about it a few days ago, but just based on others' thoughts. But now I have gotten access to the beta (thanks Narendra!)

In the past few months I have fiddled with a long list of online calendar tools -- Plaxo, Planzo, Kiko, Airset, and Trumba -- but I haven't connected with any of them. Mostly because I am looking for a calendar tool to pull together the various unconnected elements of a digital life, not to simply replace a Filofax.

30 Boxes is at an incomplete stage, but what there is is dead-on. Especially the social element.

In this screenshot (click to expand), I have clicked on a particular day, and all the timestamped elements of my digital world are pulled in: blog posts, Flickr photos, and I had hoped to see recent music played from Last.fm, but I had some sort of RSS snafu. (Along the way I discovered that my favorite geoloco app, Plazes.com, does not provide an RSS feed for my peregrinations, which is dumb.)

But also notice the stuff that my new buddy, Thomas Hawk, has incorporated into his calendar which I am including into mine. This is where it gets interesting.

30Boxes allows users to tag events, which would perhaps be cool all on its own. However, when you are setting up the sharing filters for friends getting access to you calendar, you can restrict access to those events tagged with specific terms. For the members of a project team, you can grant access only to events with the project name tag, for example. Or you can show your karate events to other karateka from your dojo. Or family events to family.

There's a long shopping list of missing things -- scheduling meetings, iCal subscribe and publish, RSS feeds, inward filters (I might want to only see certain things from Thomas' calendar, even if he is giving me everything), javascript (for embedding calendars into blogs and other websites), search, and groups (all members of a team could be managed at once) -- but what is there is good.

And of course, I still want the Nerdvana buddylist view: where the various posts, pictures, and events associated with my friends are displayed as attributes hanging off an instant messaging style buddylist, and my attributes and presence info are displayed to them in their buddylists. But I bet I will have to wait for Yahoo, Google, MSN, or AOL to provide that for me.

tags: 30boxes, nerdvana, social+calendaring, social+tools, social+networks, calendaring, plaxo, planzo, trumba, kiko, iCal, plazes.com, last.fm

Comments

[Narendra]

Stowe,

Glad you enjoyed the "pre" Beta. We do have a bunch of stuff to finish up and are frantically working to open things up tomorrow.

Just a couple of clarifications.

1) I just added my last.fm RSS feed and it parsed without a hitch.

2) We should have iCalendar OUT done tonight which will let you subscribe to your 30B calendar and make for a nice offline version (and peace-of-mind backup). We still want to add iCal subscriptions as overlays.

RSS feeds and Badges will come in the next day or so. Every user now has a "public" html page as well as a vCard url that they can distribute.

We are very excited to add an OPML file describing your federated persona which we hope will make it easier for new applications to build community and rich personalization without hampering new users for the same info.

3) We do have search under the Find menu but it is limited to your events and your toggled buddies. We hope to add your feeds as well.

4) We do have "meetings" called invitations, any event you add can include people +joe@gmail.com that builds an event with yes/no notification and a commenting system inline.

5) Inward filters is a great idea!

6) Groups, well...

[Stella Maris]

I prefer the free PIM http://www.Airset/com because it allows me to create multiple calendars for different roles, family members, co-workers, etc. I can view calendars combined or separately. Plus, each calendar has a blog space, lists function, Web links, and contacts, and I can view any of these according to role. (For example, I can see all my family's tasks lists connected to the family calendar, and all my work tasks connected to my work calendar.)

[Stowe Boyd]

Nerendra -

Groups are really just a big time saver. "All the people in group X can see events tagged X" is simpler than doing each one by one.

Meeting scheduling could be a widget that you or others build via the API. Basically the notion of posting a proposed meeting for certain times, and all those 'invited' can indicate which times are best or worst.

inward filters -- abso.

I had missed the 'find' tab -- might be the wrong place for those tabs? Like the close button on the bottom (everything in the world has close buttons on the top, right?) of the windows you pop?

Calendar out -- cool.

RSS feed -- I will try the last.fm thing again.

OPML file -- cool.

Can't wait for what's coming next!

[Stowe Boyd]

Stella -

I tried Airset, but found the UI to be annoying. And I didn't need a blog space, but I wanted to collate info from other services.

[Steven Brier]

I would love to get an invitation to try 30 boxes. Put that on your calendar and let me know. thanks.

[Terry Gupta]

I've been using rsscalendar.com for some time now. It was the first to use a lot of the features that 30boxes is preaching about. Where is the innovation?

[Uzair]

Stella -- for all practical purposes, 'multiple calendars' is the same as tagging events. So, you would set up a tag for work, one for family, etc. and then tag your events accordingly. 30 Boxes (or CalendarHub, or any other calendar supporting tags) would then allow you to pick which tags you want to make visible on your calendar -- you could deselect all tags other than work and get the equivalent of your 'work calendar', or choose both work and family and thereby get a combined view of events from both.

IMHO, the UI aspect of calendar apps is quite trivial -- it's the stuff going on behind the scenes that gets somewhat complicated: sharing, managing different timezones, etc. I was writing one myself in C# before I realized how crowded the calendar-app-space is...and the concept is too basic for sufficient differentiation to build a stand-alone business. You might get bought out by Google/Amazon/Microsoft, but there are enough players in the market to choose from already.