Deville Companies and Life

30boxes

Honestly, I love 30 Boxes. Its a great service, and it has plenty of people who agree. They are innovative, constantly coming out with creative features.

• Buddies
• MySpace, Flickr, Upcoming and other Web 2.0 site integration
• SMS and Email reminders
• Integrated Mapping
• Tags
• The One Box
  
• Themes

Buddies

30boxes allows you to define and invite buddies. Its similar to other calendars allowing you to selectively share your caledar. Whats different about 30boxes is the ability to include RSS feeds in your calendar. So I can see when my buddies blogged about different events, and when the next events might happen. I can also send invites while adding an event, its part of The One Box.

Web 2.0 Integration

Like many sites out there, 30Boxes has taken advantage of RSS and API’s to integrate with other sites. A good example is Flickr, by simply adding your Flickr ID to 30Boxes you can get a Photostream from Flickr. It is preset to handle Flickr, Webshots, LiveJournal, MySpace, and Upcoming.org.

SMS and Email Reminders

30Boxes’ integrated email reminders and SMS reminders early in the game, and it has been a lifesaver. Its nice to be able to blog about a move or a freelance job ahead of time and get a reminder before I reach panic time. It could also be a nice way to transfer events to your phone.

Integrated Mapping

Including brackets ([ ]) around an address in the One Box allows you to include a link to Google Maps in your event. Thus in one place it gives all the info I need.

Tags

What Web 2.0 site would be complete without tags? This is especially appealling to the GTD side of me, because I can use tags as contexts, and then I can print out views of only those tags. This is also nice because I can share only certain tags with certain people, thus giving me really nice privacy control

The One Box

Where do I start? Its a smart entry box. No more going through form after form, everything can be assigned from the One Box. You can add notes in parentheses, maps in brackets, color, tags, invites, and of course, time and event title.
The entire thing is just great. I love it. So why do I have an issue?

Repeat Functionality

Hows the progress on repeat going? Its the most requested feature in the forums, and in contrast to Narendra’s comment to Will here, saying:

We added a fair amount of repeats and have been working hard on a bunch of other things including webcal and email to calendar before considering if we want to replicate the very arcane attributes of Outlook

its not arcane. Its a needed feature, and it is part of the iCal specification. I don’t understand why it isn’t at the top of the upcoming features list. They keep adding it peicemeal, but not all the way. Google Calendar has it. Yahoo Calendar has it. It really shouldn’t be that hard. As it is, I think they are going to start losing users if they don’t implement it soon.