Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

http://30boxes.com is a brand new webservices. The public beta was launched last Sunday.

The purpose of the site is to solve the surprisingly difficult problem of calendaring. What’s wrong with calendaring, you might ask? Well, lots of things. Existing calendaring applications are complicated and clumsy, unpractical for sharing and social interactions, and, well, “traditional”.

http://30boxes.com chose a fresh approach. They have totally and completely minimized and simplified the user interface.

Entering events can be done with as little as filling in one single text field. Application understands human language like “tomorrow”, “yesterday”, and “next week”. You can have “buddies” which is just their term for contacts. All you have to do to add a contact is specify email address. You buddies can have calendars of their own, you can share calendars and even use the system to send invitations and confirmations/denies for events. You can track a lot more information about your buddies too - Flickr photos, LiveJournal entries, MySpace blog, and any other RSS feed. When there are new items - you get a small icon on the appropriate day of the calendar and can quickly check what they are up to.

The interface looks very clean and works pretty fast. It’s also based on AJAX technology which allows you to see updates without refreshing the page - feels nice.

Check it out - it costs nothing, and can do a lot for your organized life!

I was pointed to a couple of outstanding web services that I will talk more about later. For now here are the links:

• Upcoming.org — Social calendar
  Tagged as: calendar rss social syndication tags tools web xml
• Jon Udell: Upcoming events in Keene, NH — Blog post with excellent description of upcoming.org
  Tagged as: blog calendar calendars events social tags tools web
• To do list, simple, easy, fast, sharable: Ta-da List
  Tagged as: lists personal pim social todo tools web

Than there was this excellent flash animation that gives a good idea of Atlantic hurricanes - their strength, timing, and pathes. Thanks to Lev for this one.

• CNN.com Specials: Atlantic hurricane season 2004 — Flash demonstration of hurricanes in the Atlantic in 2004
  Tagged as: cnn disasters flash hurricane nature presentations visual

A good set of reading about blogging - why and how people do it. Also has a couple of interviews with famous bloggers.

• rebecca blood :: books, articles, rambles, bloggers on blogging
  Tagged as: articles blogging blogs interviews

These were shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user tvset on 2005-09-01.

While playing around with del.icio.us I thought about how useful it would be to have a calendar which could operate with tags. This way, a jazz festival in Cyprus that is going to happen in Cyprus during 16-18 of September this year, for example, could have been tagged as “jazz”, “festivals”, “events”, “music”, “cyprus” as well as “16sep2005″, “17sep2005″, “18sep2005″. And maybe even as “year2005″ and “september”.

It is easy to find some format to express dates and times - there is no question about that. After that is done, the set of events can be represented in a variety of forms. The usual calendar table could be filled using the date format. The list of events for a certain month or year could be combined. Or it could even be categorised based on tags.

It would be possible to make queries like “Show me the list of music events that are planned for September 2005 in Cyprus” or “Show me the list of Cyprus festivals”. These could be easily used together with the usual calendaring stuff like “What is planned for September?”.

If there was some calendaring application that could work with del.icio.us it would awesome! Just think of the possibilities! A combined calendar of events with geographic locations and links to website for more information maintained by a bunch of interested people. And since del.icio.us provides RSS feeds for everything, it would be really easy to update and monitor such a calendar. That would be partially competing with the service provided by Airset. Purhaps there are even some commercial applications that could be based on this service.

Now all we need is for someone to create it…

I’ve been looking for a tool to do shared calendaring for some time now. I went through manual editing of text files, ical, Korganizer, RSSCalendar.com and some other tools that I don’t remember anymore. None of these provided all the functionality and comfort that I needed. So, I used neither one of them.

Today, I finally came across a tool that looks very promising. One of the comments to this post in Alexandra Samuel blog suggested AirSet.

I tried it and it was love from the first sight! AirSet provides a free online service for managing and sharing of calendars, contact lists, and web links. It features flexible access control facilities with user and group management. Sharing of information can be neatly controlled and can be utilized either via RSS feeds or via AirSet web service.

I liked it so much that I immediately registered and created my public calendar. Check the “Calendar” link at the navigation bar at the top of the page. There you will find my public calendar and a link to the RSS feed with items for the next 30 days.

I foresee a lot of popularity for AirSet in the near future. Congratulations to the development team for a really nice service. Let’s see how stable it is.