Faithful readers “may recall a link”:http://kennsarah.net/2004/02/29/jon-udell-the-calendar-fiasco/ back in 2004 to ??Jon Udell??’s apt lamentation of the state of digital calendars. Even with the web and RSS and iCal, there just simply has not been a sustainable way for me to share a family calendar with my wife in the same way I can share my work calendar with my coworkers. Everything available has been a half-way solution, only to crumble under the weight of it’s hacky workarounds: read-only iCal feeds, maddening data incompatabilities (“what do you _mean_ my Palm event categories won’t sync to my Mac?”), and wonky user interfaces make adding an event to your calendar a 12-field process on the Palm, Mac or PC. And God help you if you found something new you want to try and have to migrate your data.
The next evolution of calendars are finally starting to surface. “30 Boxes”:http://30boxes.com, the shiny new web 2.0 venture that “made the rounds”:http://photomatt.net/2006/02/02/30-boxes/ a few months ago took me some time to fully grok (partly because it couldn’t import my data until very recently), but now I love it. And here’s why: I can set up my calendar and share it with my friends in a simple, straightforward interface. No tabbing through a dozen fields: their one-field user interface lets me enter plain-English events such as “Dinner with Sarah’s Friends on 4/13 at 6 PM to 10 PM” and 30B figures out what I mean. I can set up “buddies” who can see all of my calendar, or only certain events that I tag. I can get reminders on my cell phone. It’s web-based so I can use it anywhere. It supports iCal, so, when the “Village Church”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com supports it (real soon now), I can subscribe to the church calendar and have their events show up in my own calendar. And, perhaps most admirably, it doesn’t lock up my data in a proprietary format in case I want to jump ship and try another product (unlike Palm and Outlook). This kind of thing almost makes me wish I didn’t buy a smart phone: if I can interact with my calendar over SMS, who needs to sync annoying devices with lame user interfaces?
Yesterday, Google “finally announced”:http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/04/its-about-time.html the “already leaked”:http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/03/08/exclusive-screenshots-google-calendar/ Google “Calendar service”:http://calendar.google.com. So slick, so corporate, and already supports many of the features in 30 Boxes. In a way, I’m kind of sad they launched–Google’s brand and advertising leverage is surely going to cut a huge swath out of the market, making it tougher for the nights-and-weekends 30B crew to compete. They’re up for the challenge, though, having blogged that they’re “planning to out-innovate Google”:http://30boxes.com/blog/index.php/2006/04/13/30-boxes-vs-google-calendar/: “Whatever Google brings to the table, we’ll do it better.” Good on ya, 30B, and godspeed.
Interestingly, Google Calendar also follows on the heels of 37signals’ announcement that they “will be integrating a calendar”:http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/backpack_survey_results.php into their “Backpack”:http://www.backpackit.com product, with which I’ve had a love/hate relationship for a year now (sometimes as a paying customer, sometimes as a free-account user). My concern with the Backpack Calendar (bCal?) is that 37signals may charge too much to make it usable. Given that their business model is to charge subscription rates for quality software, they’re really going to have to come up with some serious pricing innovation to make their calendar compelling with respect to the 800 lb. Google gorilla. Either way, I’m very interested to see what the team who came up with “painless project management”:http://www.basecamphq.com and wrote “Getting Real”:http://getreal.37signals.com does with the digital calendar.
At the moment, though, if you’re looking for a killer app that will help you get your life organized, I would highly recommend you check out “30 Boxes”:http://30boxes.com.
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Um, can I use it in conjunction with Outlook? That’s what I use at work, and what I’m required to use, but can I use them simultaneously?
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Hey Kyleen–you can use both, but they won’t integrate yet. I use Outlook for work stuff and 30B for the rest of my life. As I understand it, Outlook 2007 will let you “subscribe” to calendars, which would let you have your 30B calendar show up in Outlook.
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Well drat. 2 calendars doesn’t sound all that appealing . . . it doesn’t go with the mantra my mother’s always reciting at me: “Eliminate and Concentrate”. I’m just a single girl who really doesn’t need to share her social calendar with the rest of the world, and I don’t have Outlook 2007, so maybe I’ll just stick with Outlook for now.
Besides, I’m entirely too busy worrying about switching my blog to wordpress and changing over to a gmail account. My “To Geek” list is long enough. 😉
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Google Calendar has the same problem as every other calendar, you can’t import and export properly. In googles case, at all. Personally I only like the idea of a web client when I am away from my desktop systems.
But google also has an additional problem, can you trust them? They want to hold as much information about you as possible, so that they can send you targetted advertising. This worries me, I want to see less advertising through the day, not more. Even my gmail account is a ‘junk’ account that i use primarly for domain registration.
I’m still waiting for a great web calendar service that will sync with my .Mac account, and thus my iCals on my different macs.
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Mike, I agree that the public/private question looms large when it comes to Google–but they’re really just a microcosm of hosted solutions in general. You could reasonably say the same thing about 30 Boxes, Hotmail, etc.
One interesting thing about both of these services is that they’re pushing the boundary on private calendar information. By default, 30B shares everything that you don’t mark private, and gCal gives you the option of making your calendar searchable anyone to see.
At first I recoiled a bit at the thought of making that much information public, but, then I realized, who cares if someone else knows that it’s Laundry Day? 🙂 I was also able to add a feed to the left of the blog (way at the bottom) of upcoming public events–events I especially tag to be public.
Speaking of ads, though–does anyone have any idea how 30B will make any money? Are they planning on charging for this software-as-a-service? They’re not big enough to have corporate tie-in to other services (like Blogger for Google), and they seem too passionate about the UI to throw ads in. I wonder how those VC investors think they’ll get some ROI…
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They are probably hoping to get bought by google or yahoo or some other big company. That’s really the goal of any VC company, make a great service or product then sell it when its profitable.
who cares if someone else knows that it’s Laundry Day?
you plan your laundry day? That’s a little … odd. I just do mine when the basket i have doesn’t hold anymore dirty clothes 😛
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Mike, I dunno. Maybe they’re building to flip–hard to tell. You’re right, though, that VC funding is telling.
I do plan Laundry Day. Sarah has to wear a uniform to work so, whether the basket’s full or not, I have to make sure the laundry is done regularly (1x per week, at least). I just set a reminder in my calendar so I stuff it into the laundry bags on Wednesday night and drop it off during lunch on Thursday. I found that outsourcing laundry for the extra $4 is SO worth it.
That’s probably more about my dirty socks than you wanted to know. 😉
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