30 Boxes Beta Goes Live
30 Boxes, an online calendar project created by 83 Degrees, has just gone into a live beta. 30 Boxes isn’t your average online calendar; it adds social networking into the mix. You can add friends that also have 30 Boxes accounts. This overlays your friends calendar on top of yours. If you have events you don’t want others to know about, you can keep them private from your friends. Similar to Facebook, your friends need to ask you to view your calendar, so strangers can’t look at your schedule. It wouldn’t be a great Web 2.0 app without a fantastic design. The calendar looks great and performs well - you can resize your window as you please and the calendar adjusts accordingly. However, cooler than all of this is what Thomas Hawk said:
Not only do your buddies scheduled events show up on your calendar (if you choose), but so do their Flickr photos, their Upcoming.org events, and even their blog posts. Merely by typing in their email address 30 Boxes goes out and fetches the RSS feeds for Flickr photos, upcoming and it even found my Blogger Blog.
Since 30 Boxes is online and has its own feed, you can subscribe to it with in iCal! Extremely nifty in my mind. All of these features in beta, I can’t wait until final comes around. Go ahead and make your own account here. You can add me to your buddies: paul(dot)stamatiou(at)gmail(dot)com.
Here are a few screen caps I took of my account. However, I could only capture so many features, it’s much more impressive in person. 30 Boxes currently supports 3 themes: OS X Gray, Gmail Blue and flickr white, all of which can be changed on the fly.
Hot.
I’ll sign up.
It seems as thought 30 Boxes has exceeded it’s bandwidth with the number of signups and has limited registration, presumably until they upgrade their servers. This is very similar to the Google Analytics launch - they couldn’t keep up with demand so they had to temporarily shutdown new user registration.
Gee, I must have snuck in right under the window. It’s timing out a lot! Once they work through that, it seems like a pretty good application. There’s a few things lacking, bi-weekly repeats, week view… a couple cool things ‘coming soon.’ I look forward to RSS feeds of my calendar.
All in all, seems like a good stand alone calendaring option, I’m not interested in the social aspects (I find the RSS feeds of my flickr photos to be an annoyance and would be doubly annoyed by having to see others’ flickr feeds), but the upcoming features (if they come up soon), the iCal integration (which I haven’t tried yet), and general grace of the layout and operation are nice to see.
They were discussing something similar to bi-weekly repeats somewhere in the 30 Boxes forums.
I am still really mixed about Lightbox/JS-floating-div heavy interfaces…we’ll just have to see how I like it in a week.
cool app- the calendering aspect of GTD is really big, isn’t it.
I like it. Very nice interface although on this crappy 5 year old PC it doesn’t ‘flow’ as much as it should. Such a shame I don’t have any friends 2.0, I’d probably be loving this a lot more if I did.
30boxes is one of the most useful Web2.0 sites I have seen (at least for me), thanks for the post.
I started using it a few days. I think its great except when you delete an instance that is a recurring event, it doesn’t just give you the option to delete 1… you have to delete all of them.
Other than that its pretty handy. I got my husband to sign up so we can keep our calendars synched.