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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