Friday, February 17, 2006

Calendar first impression

About a year ago, it appears that among the web trend-watchers out there, a consensus was met that there was a real opportunity in the market of a web calendar. The previous standard was Yahoo’s calendar, but no one thought of it as an awesome product, it was simply what was available. Google and Yahoo started looking for great web calendar start-ups to buy, and starts-ups started trying to fill those shoes.

According to Joel on Software, these folks made the mistake of trying to be bought instead of trying to make a great product. Instead of making something that can stand on its own, its obvious that these calendars have been created for the sole purpose of being bought. After reading about, and trying out some of these calendars, I realize, WOW, I do want a great web calendar where I can keep all my info (for the time being).

Right now, 30Boxes is the one I like the most. It might not be the most professional looking (definitely is cool looking), or even have the most features (calendar ones at least), but its interface is awesome to use (AJAX), and it has the potential to create a huge web community behind it. You can link calendars with friends, allow others to add events to your calendar, and establish a detailed profile that ties all of your activities on upcoming.org, flickr.com, your blog feeds, and even your local weather into not only your calendar, but everyone that can see yours. It has great potential to be useful, but also is just a lot of fun.

Around the same time last year, one of the first groups to participate in The Summer Founder Program groups had the same idea. The result is Kiko, another great AJAX calendar that has big dreams of being purchased. Its got some features that 30boxes doesn't have, but you can check it out for yourself.

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