It’s literally been ten years since Yahoo updated its online calendar. And it’s been more than two years since Google launched its Web-based calendar. But tonight it will start rolling out a new drag-and-drop, Ajax calendar in a closed beta to Yahoo Mail users in the U.S., UK, India, Taiwan, and Brazil. You can sign up for it here.
The new Yahoo Calendar doesn’t do much that you cannot already do with Google’s or other online calendars. It is based on underlying technology from its Zimbra enterprise e-mail unit, and supports both iCal and CalDAV standards for the easy import and export of events. The new features compared to Yahoo’s Web 1.0 calendar are:
- Drag & drop interface.
- Layering (view multiple calendars in different colors or subscribe to someone else’s calendar)
- Zoom in when adding an event or appointment
- Integration with Flickr
- Can set email, IM or SMS reminders.
- To-Do list.
Compared to other onlne calendar’s such as Google’s. there is nothing novel here other than the zoom-in function and the Flickr integration. The Flickr feature adds some nice eye candy by randomly selecting highly rated Creative Commons photos as background thumbnails for up to eight days each month. In the future, Yahoo will let you upload photos from your own Flickr stream. It is also planning on letting users add events from Upcoming.org, or subscribe to calendars from Yahoo Sports (game dates), Yahoo Finance (earnings schedules), Yahoo TV (programming schedules for your favorite TV shows), and other properties including from partner sites.
Despite being a me-too offering, this should help Yahoo grow its market share in online calendars. It is already the market leader, even with its 1.0 product (consumer inertia is on its side). According to comScore, Yahoo Mail has 285 million users worldwide (88 million in the U.S.), and of those 8.1 million use the calendar (3.7 million in the U.S.). Google Calendar has 5 million users worldwide, and 2.4 million in the U.S. The Web 2.0 makeover should help Yahoo maintain its lead for at least a little while longer.
Comments
Ahh, another wet fart from Yahoo.
That is not the Queens English. It shall rather be referred to as post-rectal gelatinous disharge.
I think this calander thing is going to pull them out of their nosedive. They should add a feature to it whereby you can track YHOO’s plumetting stock price from week to week.
http://dir.yahoo.com/
There is another amazingly outdated Yahoo site. Maybe we’ll see a cool refresh sometime in 2009? How many people work on this thing? how much does it cost the company??
Gotta love those amazingly targeted ads too! No wonder the place is imploding!
With Asia down about 4% right now & Yahoo’s failure to unload its stake in Alibaba, TaoBao, & GMarket ealier this year, I wouldn’t be surprised if Yahoo tests the $12 mark before the end of the week! http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/.....technology
Poor Jerry. Who cares if you lay off a couple thousand people because you didn’t sell to MSFT. At least you’re still Chief Yahoo
Um, correction: Your list of new features includes one that is noticeably absent from Google Calendar…
“6. To-Do list.”
Despite this feature being requested countless times by Google users, and Google stating they were working on it (about a year ago, with no updates since), Google Calendar STILL lacks this functionality to any degree - much to the frustration of users like myself.
In fact, Google Calendar hasn’t seen much updating since its release two years ago… let’s hope Google doesn’t wait another eight before we see features like a to-do list.
(btw, am I the only one getting a weird error when I try to comment in Opera?)
Agreed. Although Remember the Milk integration with Gmail sort of made me forget about this for a while.
Ya know, I used to use RTM in Gmail but it drove me bonkers that I kept needing to sign in separately to RTM too often. Any way to stay logged in?
Constantly needing to log in is what drove me from yahoo mail to gmail years ago.
wow i cant believe they went that long between releases. its like the engineers at yahoo do nothing but get paid.
errr. you seriously think there were engineers assigned to this for 10 years without a release? the unit was not assigned any resources for years is the obvious fact.
from wat i know till now there was no fulltime person supporting calender till this one
Wow I can’t believe usage stats for online calanders are so pitiful! I would have though a lot more people used google’s offering. Another ding in the valley echo chamber.
Usage stats are low because there haven’t been a lot of great calendar apps out there, and most didn’t interoperate with those of your friends and family. iCalendar (RFC 2445) and CalDAV support, along with Yahoo’s participation in the Calendaring & Scheduling Consortium (www.calconnect.org) - whose goal is calendar interoperability - will help.
And so it begins…
it looks very pretty, the zoom in feature is very useful, but I found one bug quickly.
why it took a long time to get the ajax version ,the ajax tech has been long used in the word.
Too little too late!
Cute integration with Flickr. But compared to ours at http://www.6zap.com or google calendar it’s missing some things:
* Not fully a single page AJAX calendar. Too many page refreshes. When you go to the event details page for instance, it loads a new page.
* No ability to create multiple day events with drag and drop
* No exception to recurring events. This is a show stopper.
* No agenda/list view
On one hand, not bad for an initial release, on the other hand, with their resources, they could do better. I’m sure, that now that they’re paying attention to it again, it’ll get better fast.
Now, if you want your own private open source version, come to us :-).
Checked out your site, Looks nice. Your interface is pretty clean. What kind of internet connection do you guys have, I’ve got Gig to the internet and I notice it loads kind of slow. For being Ajaxed I was thinking it should be faster.
Does this work on your site?
* No ability to create multiple day events with drag and drop
I was not able to do that. Do you have to sign up for a non free account to get that feature?
The agenda/list view is pretty nice. I’ll keep playing around with your site, its got potential.
2 ways to create a multiple day event in the calendar.
1. In week view drag and drop in the top part of the day (where you click for an all day event).
2. In month view drag and drop over the dates for the event.
Glad you liked it. Please post in our forums at http://www.6zap.com/forums-index-php/ if you have any questions.
Thank you for the instructions on how to create the multi-day events. I went to your site and tried it again and it works as described. I think the way I was trying to use it was different and thus why it wasnt working for me. For example I tried to create an appointment and then drag that appointment so that it would cover 2 days. That wasnt working out so well. But I see how I should use the feature now. Thanks!
its nice
6zap i am hearing for the first time but does it provide much features then flickr
api?
indeed yahoo calendar having great functionality now. its not too late.
what is new in yahoo calendar that google dosn’t have ?
The only thing Yahoo has vs. Google is a PR team that needs to seed stories with the blogs since most of their products can’t create buzz on their own!
Notice how all this Yahoo garbage become prominent across my favorite tech blogs after the Microsoft ordeal. Desperate attempt by a dead company.
Even if it is just a kind of copy of Google calendar doesn’t mean it’s bad or not useful. Even if personally I use Google calendar I think that’s a good news for Yahoo calendar users. Who already using the Google suite would really switch to yahoo because of their calendar? I think that people use Google calendar because they are using Gmail too.
Y! Calendar was under Brad “Peanut Butter Manifesto” Garlinghouse for a long time…
I know this is mostly a catchup-with-Google update, but Yahoo! bringing their calendar up to the times is a good thing for everyone, right? There seems to be a lot of bashing here.
LOL, I was wondering if that would EVER happen! LOL
http://www.anonymity.at.tc
Calendar apps in general still are missing stuff - but most importantly, interoperability. Work on RFC 2445 (iCalendar) and CalDAV (not DEV) is improving the situation. The Calendaring & Scheduling Consortium (www.calconnect.org) is working hard on issues; Yahoo and MSFT are members, I think Google may be too, along with calendar software vendors, universities, etc.
Yahoo, once again…
Smells the dust…
how do you change the header color, and import that calendar on the right?
Pathetic that they’re finally doing that now. Been able to do many of those things w/ Google Calendar. But Google has a head up with the integration between GMail and Google Calendar. If someone sends me an email mentioning a date or appt, GMail has a link with the date and information. By clicking on the link it incorporates the date, time, location and other information into Google Calendar.
Competition for google is a good thing. I will be giving this a try since google calendar e-mail notifications keep breaking for me. I need something that is more reliable than google calendar has been for me.
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