I use MS Outlook to take care of almost everything related to schedules, events, correspondence etc, but I can’t let anyone else see what’s up, unless they work with me. And ss my life gets more complex I’m starting to need a shared calendar for my life outside of work. Primarily a calendar to share with my girlfriend.
“Is dinner with the Berman’s tonight or tomorrow, dear?” And “Can you tell me when do you leave for Newark again?” comes up a lot.
My girlfriend is much more organised than I and the thought of using a fridge-centric calendar is just too “suburban-mini-van” for me. The problem is that I don’t spend most of my day when I’m organising my life near the fridge.
So, where to find a simple, web accessbile, sharable calendar? Well, I think I found one. (In fact there’s at least a few other apps like this.) 30 boxes is a dead simple idea. Display the next 30 days with a very simple graphic treatment and allow people that you choose to view your schedule. Then invite someone (your girlfriend for instance) to 30 boxes and have them add things to their calendar. Right now, we’ve got it so my items overlay on her calendar, and her items overlay on my calendar. And we can makes edits whenever we’re connected. Perfect.
It’s still in beta (like everything else. GMail is still in beta you know) and there’s a few things I’d like to have added: import my contacts from Outlook, import my events from Outlook, import my notes from Outlook, etc etc.
There’s one really nice touch inbuilt into 30 boxes which makes me feel that it’s extremely hip to the connected lives we live thesedays. You can add detail to each of your contacts so that whenever they make a new post on their blog, or post images on Flickr, they show up as roll over text on those days on my calendar. This is just a clever way to leverage some of the masses of data out there floating around.
Give it a try.
