30 Boxes beta on February 5th

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.

30 Boxes Countdown

The clever folks at 83° are about to launch a new calendar-ish app called 30 Boxes:

[from 30 Boxes Countdown by Narendra Rocherolle]

[…] we are trying to create an application that you want to look at and work with every day. It is easy to add events (we have a very slick natural language parser that even your Mom will like) and it is easy to build up a small social network with whom you can share all or parts of your life.

When you think about it, a calendar is very much like a simple blog or journal and we anticipate that people (and application developers) will catch on to this potential. Ready to put your running log online? How about vacation notes that you can revisit down the road?

30B is also a handy way to passively communicate by letting people know where you’ll be or where you’ve been as well as a DLA (digital lifestyle aggregator) gluing together all the pieces of your online presence (e.g. photos, blogs, myspace, and the like).

Thomas Hawk has a detailed discussion of the beta, here, that plays up the social aspects of 30 boxes. Om Malik says “30 Boxes will be to calendars what GMail was to Email”.

I hope these guys come up with something to solve the calendar/time trace/future projections problems I have had for the past few years. I want to

• to share calendars with colleagues, family, and clients, but in varying degrees of visibility
• to aggregate things I have created — blog posts, comments, bookmarks, photos — in a timeline view, and republish that
• to collate stuff I have touched — web pages, doc edits, address book entries, files downloaded — through a chronological view
• to project upcoming travel, so that others can try to hook up with me, including requests for meetings
• and to publish RSS feeds of all sorts.

Anyway, I am looking forward to this with real eagerness.

It’s interesting that last fall, when I interviewed Jason Fried of 37signals, he explicitly rejected the notion of building a better calendar app, arguing that no one could define how it should work. His perspective was/is that there is not enough agreement about what a good calendar app should do and not do. I disagreed, but then I was only hoping for the app of my dreams, not other peoples’.