irgeek.net

I know I am a bit slacking on this … but I have a very good excuse. I have spent the last week or two trying to use 30 Boxes and I have been entirely incapable of doing so. I have come to the realization that my life is boring and uneventful, and when it’s not it is definitely not planned out. I did however force myself to use the features of 30 Boxes just so I could get an idea of how it works.

I’ve got to say I realy like it and look forward to the day where I have things to schedule in my Calendar. It has a very cool entry box where you just freehand type in an event and it parses all of the information out of it and posts it to your calendar. It can also keep track of your flickr images, your myspace blogs, livejournal posts … it can also track any RSS feed and display it in your calendar. It also has tight integration with upcoming.org, another social calendar. I haven’t been able to try that out because I don’t have an account there … must be the whole lack of need for a calendar at this point in my life.

It also has another seemingly cool feature, the whole social aspect of it. I haven’t been able to try this out either because I don’t really know anyone else who uses 30 Boxes, but basically what it does is you can add people to your buddies and track what plans they have. Would be really great for co-workers who are always on the move and need to know when they can get together to talk about the new project. Or say you and your S.O. have really busy work lives, say one of you travels … this would be another great way to keep in touch with each others doings. Or even for a group of friends who wanna know whats going on. Perhaps an organization having a calendar of events all the members could subscribe to. The possibilities are endless.

The only feature I didn’t see that I need in a calendar is more advanced repeat capabilities. Currently 30 boxes can repeat an event every week, every month, or every year. One of the main things I would like to be able to do is schedule something to occue on the first of the month, or the last, or the third, etc … Would also be nice to be able to have something repeat every X days or weeks from a particular starting point. I posted to their forums and got a few other requests for this feature, so I don’t doubt it will be in there eventually.

Another feature I would like is for you to be able to subscribe to an iCal calendar feed and have iCal subscribe to your 30 Boxes calendar feed so that they are essentially the same calendar. If your at home on your PC, you can use iCal as it would be faster than a web interface, but when you go out to work or to the coffee hosue, your 30 Boxes account has all the events you posted in iCal while you were at home, and when you go back home, iCal has all your 30 Boxes posts from when you were out.

Even without these features, I think this is a really awesome service especially for the social aspect of it. I do think that those feature will be in by the time it is out of Beta along with a stream of other fantastic features. Defiantely a service worth using and keeping an eye on.