Admittedly, “web 2.0″ is a buzz-word. My Business Systems teacher says that it’s really an all-new internet that’s being built, as we speak. Just like how Al Gore (and probably some other people too) laid the actual cable that became the “Information Superhighway”, they’re building a new Internet, with fatter cables and more capacity. The old Internet is old hat, it’s getting bloated with YouTube videos and SoulSeek. All hail Web 2.0!
But actually, I’m not discussing that web 2.0. I’m discussing the movement in website development and application development that’s characterized by more CSS, Java, and now Ajax driven design, and more online applications and social bookmarking and networking than you can shake a stick at, along with a healthy dose of mobile integration. It’s got nifty words like “wiki” “rss” “opensource” and “social bookmarking”. Or at least that’s what I can gather that web 2.0 is. Where’s that Wikipedia definition again?
There’s a couple of new applications or websites that could be branded as “web 2.0″ that I absolutely love and which have become indispensible to me. There are quite a few out there – almost too many. In fact, a blog I really like, Postbubble exists for the purpose of separating the wheat from the chaff. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t some real gems out there, at least for me.
30 boxes I found as I find most things – browsing around on someone else’s site, I saw a badge displaying events, (the blog author’s dentist appointments and such) and a link to something called 30boxes. What’s this? Oh great, another calendar application. Whoopideedoo. I already have two desktop apps (iCal for my Mac and Outlook for my PC), two online apps (yahoo calendar and google calendar) and one mobile app (on my BB), not to mention the myriad calendars that I have to keep up for different events like 2-3 MySpace pages, Events pages on two different websites, and the Upcoming Shows list for my own website. Why would I possibly need yet another calendar? What I really need is one calendar to rule them all! my precious… I mean, what I really need is one interface to put all of my dates in, tag them with where I want them to output, and be able to see everything all at once! That would be fabulous…
30boxes does all that – and even more (if it can be imagined). In fact, the talented crew over there is always adding things to the service to make it more integrated with the other online services you already use. Granted, I don’t use all of their other gadgets as heavily as the calendar itself, but I like the way they’re thinking. Your online persona is too scattered over different profiles and passwords and accounts for applications and services that are basically competitors, so why should they share information? Not anymore!
Interface
First of all, the 30boxes interface is a clean, brushed metal, very homey for those of us that use OSX. But you can change that if you want. They actually have different themes you can switch to. The main component of the interface is the One Box. At first I never used the One Box, and only used the Detailed Entry to add my events. It’s got everything you need – start and end dates and times, recurring events (with a new script that will help you with birthdays), and the mother of all web organization: TAGS! Ok, maybe I’m a little overenthusiastic, but you’ll see why when we get to the output. You can also mark your items private or not, and set up reminders if you like. You can receive reminders through email, or if you prefer, SMS text messages on your mobile phone. There’s also integration with google maps – enter an address in a special (but not too difficult) format and it creates a link in your calendar to the google maps page for that address. I love how this feature works so well – sometimes with google maps you can get multiple results for one address if you don’t put it in just so – with the 30boxes format, it’s no headache. You can also put links in your event to more info if you need it. The One Box lets you do all of that at once – once you start using the app for a while, you’ll get to know the shortcuts and adding through the OneBox actually becomes easier than using the dialog box we’re all used to. Anything to save myself some time!
Output
Here’s why I really chose this calendar app above all the rest: the output. The number one reason why I chose this app is that not only can you output the calendar to a website, blog, or desktop app (more on that in a bit), but you can do so by tag. That means that you can really have an infinite number of calendars output, based on how you tag things. If you’re like me and you run two different websites and want to output three different lists of events on the websites (probably more in the future) this is fabulous because I have one place to put all the events, and as long as I tag them all appropriately, they will automatically output to wherever I want them to go. I’ll get the right events going to the right websites, no more, no less. Tagging is really great.
In 30boxes’ committment to being practically endlessly accessible, there are a bunch of different formats to output in. You can do an Flash Badge, Javascript/HTML badge, an embedded widget, a separate page, an RSS feed, or my favorite, an iCal subscription. Now iCal may not be as prevalent as I would like, but this goes back to my old dilemma of having too many calendars. So far I’ve solved the problem of calendars on all my websites, but what about my desktop and mobile calendars? Well, all I have to do is subscribe to the webcal feed in iCal on my Mac, and now the calendar on my Mac is always in sync with my 30boxes calendar! No “syncing” necessary, it reads the feed everytime I open the app! To get the calendar on my BB online, I just have to sync the BB with my Mac, which is something most people do anyway. Remind me to send a letter to RIM requesting that BBs subscribe to webcal feeds… (Note: As far as I know, Outlook does not do webcal feeds. But maybe they will soon – webcal feeds are like the rss of calendars.)
Social Butterfly
Using OpenWeb (something I know nothing about, so don’t ask me), 30boxes can somehow see all of your online profiles that are attached to an email address. That means that when you sign up for 30boxes, it creates a profile for you with your MySpace page, Flickr Page, Vox page, Yahoo ID, etc all rolled up in there. It also helps you to find your friends in case you want to share events in the 30boxes universe. Since it found my MySpace page, it also found some of my MySpace friends – which was really nice because finding them on MySpace was such a pain in the ass with their awful people search – I don’t want to even think about trying to find them again. I can share my calendar with buddies and even share it just by tags. I can invite them to events and add emails to my address book automatically through Plaxo, gmail, and a couple others.
Mobile
30boxes has a mobile site that I got the chance to really flex when I took a trip to Miami for a week. The apartment we were in didn’t really have internet to speak of and I didn’t go on my Mac too much, and I had a gazillion events in my 30boxes that I wanted to attend. I needed 30boxes on my BB to update me every day on what event was where, when, and who was there. There was a lot to keep track of. Luckily, there is a mobile version of 30boxes that you open in your cellphone’s browser.
One thing that I really liked is that the mobile version gives you a day view vs. the month view that the full version has. It’s refreshing to see an entire application overhauled for the media (cellphone) rather than the clumsy navigation of trying to read a website that was made for computers on a tiny cellphone screen. On the mobile version, the OneBox is it – but since I became an expert at the shortcuts, it’s no big deal. All my events were listed cleanly every day, and it was easy to navigate to see what was happening tomorrow.
One thing I really didn’t like was that the google maps output didn’t work on the mobile version. Boo! That’s the main reason I took the time to put all the addresses in with the events, so that I could click on the handy link from my BB browser and be taken to a map page. Now I don’t know who is holding up the works here, it could be google maps. I also know that the “Maps” application in my BB (similar applications are popping up in all kinds of cellphones these days on T-Mobile, Verizon, and Nextel/Sprint) is way, WAY better than cellphone-browser version of google maps itself, but I really hoped to be able to get to that info via a link in the mobile version of 30boxes. What I ended up doing was copying and pasting the address info off of 30boxes and into my BB’s “Maps” app, which didn’t always work because the address format that the “Maps” app wanted wasn’t the same so it required some re-typing (ick). Not a total loss, but there’s room for improvement there.
One Tip
This probably won’t affect everyone, but most of the events in my 30boxes are club events, which means that they go past midnight. This is regularly an issue in calendars because of how the output comes out. If you have an event that goes from 10pm to 2am the next day, you may need to be careful with how you enter it into 30boxes. I’ve had some wierd errors where I didn’t enter the day that it ended (the following day) and it defaulted to the same day a year later. Also, on the day view (mouseover on full view or frontpage on mobile view) if you have an event that began the night before and ends early that morning, it comes out funny – showing up not where it ends but where it begins – the day before. If you’re confused, maybe this visual aid will help:
Monday March 19
10: 25pm American Airlines 298/898
Tuesday March 20
10:25pm American Airlines 298/898
This was a red-eye flight meaning we left at 10:25pm 3/19 and arrived at 2:50pm 3/20. If you were to look at the detail, you can see this clearly, but the mouseover only shows the start of the event. If you actually click on the day, it says “until March 20″ which is your indication that the event ends on March 20. Of course, I knew when I was going to land. But this way of displaying events got confusing later on in the week when the same party would show up two days in a row at the same time on my BB. I had a lot of events and I basically had to just choose which ones I had time to go to and finding the same thing in there two days in a row was confusing.
I don’t really know how they could fix this, because it does seem a bit complex when I describe it. My workaround (for now) is going to be to just put the start time of an event and not the end. If I really need to know when it ends, I can put it in the notes section.
Room for Growing
The message part of 30boxes, called Supermail, is brand new and still a little clunky. When I imported my gmail contacts, it told me that it could only handle 100 contacts and it wouldn’t let me pick and choose so I ended up getting A-H which kind of sucks. But since it’s beta, that’ll probably be changed soon. It’s all good though, because I didn’t sign up for 30boxes to do email. Also, I’m not bothered because I get the feeling that the 30boxes folks really “feel my pain” and that integration between online applications is one of their main if not their main priority for their application. Anyone can do a calendar – hell, I could write one on a piece of paper. Not everyone has a calendar that talks to other calendars, websites, computers and devices. That’s something special.
To get your own 30boxes calendar, visit www.30boxes.com.
