Nontrivial Exercises

My Take on Google Calendar - Give Me 30Boxes

As you probably have seen, Google got into the web2.0–ish calendar game this week with the appropriately yet blandly named Google Calendar. I thought I would give it a look and throw my input into the discussion by specifically comparing it to 30Boxes as I performed a common calendar task – creating a set of events and then sharing them with a group. The bottom line for me – Google Calendar may win over a lot of people just because it’s Google, but 30Boxes (30B) is by far the better solution.

First, a disclaimer: I use Outlook almost exclusively for my calendar needs, since I utilize a Windows platform for work. I’m also using the Outlook 2007 beta, which has some truly significant improvements over Outlook 2003, one of which is support for icalendar (webcal://…) online calendars. So, I consider myself a power-user when it comes to calendars, but my scope is fairly limited to Outlook.

I thought I would put Google Calendar to the test today with the schedule of my son’s t-ball team that I coach. I entered each of the games, opponents, locations, and who was responsible for bringing the snack (the most important part of the game when you’re 6) into a new calendar quite easily.

So far so good. As you can see from the screenshot, Google uses the metaphor of several distinct calendars that you can access, and then view as a set of one or more of these calendars. The calendars can be a friend’s calendar that he has allowed you to access, a set of holidays, or various calendars that you have created yourself. In my case, I created a calendar for my t-ball team, as you can see.

This “distinct calendar” metaphor is in contrast to the 30B approach of “unify and tag”. A user in 30B has only one calendar, but can see various sets of events on that calendar. Each event can have tags to help associate or define it as a part of a group. The tagging approach is much more natural to me – and I think to many current web users who are accustomed to tags and tagging content – though I can see how the multiple calendar paradigm is easier to manage for some people.

So, on to the sharing. I really wanted to accomplish one task in sharing my t-ball event calendar – have an easy way for others to access the calendar without signing up for the specific calendar service, preferably in an ical or webcal format.

With Google you have four options to accomplish this:

1. Invite people directly on each event by entering their email addresses in the event data. This is not desirable to me, since I have many recipients (parents with multiple emails) and I would have to do this for each game.
2. Share the calendar with other Google Calendar users. Again, this is not desirable because not everyone has a Google account and I don’t want them to have to sign up for one.
3. Provide an iCal feed of the calendar. This sounds like what I want, but it isn’t - see below.
4. Provide an RSS feed via XML. This is nice.

When attempting to share your calendar, you have two icons with associate links: one for XML and one for ICAL.

The ICAL link, however, is not a webcal://…. format, though, which is what I wanted.

Everything I could find on this indicated that you can use the ICAL URL for the Apple iCal calendar (though I can’t verify if this works since I don’t yet have a Mac). I’m not sure what the difference between iCal and the webcal://… URL format is, but it didn’t do what I wanted it to do.

Contrast this with the rich sharing options available in 30B. First, 30B creates some nice public info items for you: a public profile page, a vCard pointing back to your 30B profile, an hCard (with microformats) pointing back to 30B and a little chicklet to put on some HTML surface (webpage, blog, email) for people to add you as a 30B buddy. Nice stuff, but not earth shattering.

What is really cool about how you can share your info in 30B are the different ways to publish your calendar data. There is an RSS feed, an ICS file that you can use to import into Outlook or Apple iCal, an iCal subscription feed - the webcal://… URL I was looking for!, a CSV file which you can also use to import into Outlook, a Javascript HTML badge so you can put your calendar on your HTML surface of choice, and a MySpace-specific badge. 30B also will create a webpage with the events listed in a memo-style view, which is another very thoughtful option.

Now, to share only parts of your entire calendar in 30B, you can create a custom subset based on tags, and then have all of the above options available:

I actually ended up importing all my t-ball events that I created in Google Calendar into 30B, just so I could share them. Google does allow you to export to a file – which I did for my t-ball calendar, and then imported it into 30B and tagged them. I then used the above screen to create a custom view for my t-ball events, and voila – my many ways to share my events with my team.

In summary, It seems to me that Google Calendar is designed as part of the whole Google Experience, with easy integration to GMail, sharing with other Google users, and easy calendar groups using a paradigm of multiple, distinct calendars. 30B, on the other hand, takes a much more open and flexible approach, making many more options available for sharing info and events with others. Both have snazzy Ajax interfaces and fairly easy event entry mechanisms, but the more open approach that 30B takes makes it the winner in my book.

Technorati Tags: google, googlecalendar, 30boxes, ical, webcal