There are other services that are very similar – FriendFeed (still in private beta) and Plaxo Pulse are the most well known, but others include Mugshot, Readr, 30boxes and Spokeo.

For the most part, Iminta has features that are similar to those services, particularly FriendFeed. There are some differences worth noting, however. Whereas FriendFeed has only a single setting to make your feed public or private, Iminta allows you to create groups of friends and determine which groups see what content. On the flip side, they allow people viewing your feed to strip out some of your feeds. So if you Twitter too much, for example, your friends can choose not to see that, but leave everything else. Iminta also allows you to filter data by type when you are viewing a number of friends, or all of your friends, at once.

It makes for a less simplified interface than FriendFeed, which has its pros and cons. But as you add a lot of friends, the ability to manage the data is, in my opinion, a good thing.

Another thing I like about Iminta, and the reason I’m writing about it, is that the company has been bootstrapped to date by founder Aaron Newton (an ex CNET product manager) – I always like the non-funded startups. Newton says he began working on the site a year ago just because he wanted the product for himself and his friends. He got more serious about it, and left his job at CNET, when he first heard about FriendFeed in October.

You can request an invitation on Iminta now, and Newton says they’ll bring in as many people as they can starting on Tuesday. Once you are in you can also invite your friends – we’ve added Iminta to InviteShare to help you get a quick invite (FriendFeed is here).

One of the big features they added was a place for users to add information about what they are up to on any of dozens of other social networks – sites like Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, YouTube, etc. You then see a news feed on your Pulse pages that includes information on what your friends are up to. It’s very much like the news feed on Facebook, except its based on third party data.

Tonight they’ve launched a way for users to take that personal social network data and include it on another website via a widget. Once you have a Pulse account and have entered in a few of your feeds, you can grab the widget here. A RSS feed for this information is also available.

30Boxes may have been the first startup to innovate in this space. FriendFeed, an unlaunched startup we covered earlier this month, is also doing something very similar, as will other startups.

I’ve embedded the Plaxo widget below.

PBWiki is on a bit of a roll. After confirming a $2 million round of financing last week, they’ve just launched a partnership with 30Boxes that allows users to insert a calendar into a wiki. Actually getting the calendar into the wiki requires way too many steps, and I agree with 30Boxes founder Narendra Rocherolle that this should be made into a template option, as Jotspot did in 2006, shortly before their acquisition by Google.

Wikis are basically commodities at this point. There are dozens of hosted and unhosted versions to choose from, and revenue models are pretty thin. PBWiki has a loyal following of users, though, and has spent very little money getting to where they are today. We’ll see how they do over the next year.

There are a few reasons why, and they are good differentials that 30 Boxes has over the current competition. The first is natural language schedule additions – how this works is to add a meeting or appointment I enter something like ‘meeting with investors at 3pm tomorrow’ and it will create that meeting. If I wish to invite somebody else to the meeting I add +friend@friend.com to that string and it will send them a notification. This might sound complicated to learn but with the random examples below the entry box you quickly pick it up and get to learn what can be done.

The interface itself is very simple – it is a calendar view and you can click on any day to view appointments (which can also give you a print view – handy when you want to print out your appointments for the day and take them with you) or easily edit the details or add further detail. You calendar has a private view (which you see), a shared view (your buddies view of what appointments they have with you) and a public view (to include in your blog or anywhere else, you can mark appointments as public/private).

It was a combination of the nice interface, usability and these simple features that have made 30 Boxes my default calendar now. I can see why they already have 22,000 users and adoption outside of the usual early adopter circle.

More advanced users will enjoy the complete openness of 30 Boxes – they are rolling out an open API that allows full unrestricted access to your calendar, allow ‘remote skinning’ (ie. Skin your calendar with CSS files that are hosted on another server), they are commited to supporting greasemonkey scripts and have made it easy for them to be developed and have full open syndication of your profile and your metadata. This openness has already seen some mashups and plugins developed such as a Firefox plugin for adding items to your schedule, Outlook integration and developer libraries for a number of development languages and environments.

In your profile you can link in your profiles from other sites (Flickr, LinkedIn, MySpace etc.) and with open syndication 30 Boxes can become your primary profile on the web that can be used in other applications. This is the beginnings of a social network that 30 Boxes are aiming to build around their application that will be completely open.

One issue that I had was with timezones, since I skip between timezones frequently I have some issues such as when I fly from Australia to the USA and go back in time, but an upcoming feature will allow me to add the timezone of an appointment so the calendar will be able to sort it out. This is a complex problem that 30 Boxes is tackling but people that are in my circumstance do not make up a large portion of their user base.

30 Boxes has been developed by 83degrees, a California based company. The founders of 83degrees are Narendra Rocherolle, Nick Wilder and Julie Davidson who were prior founders and made up the management team of Webshots (which was sold to Excite@Home in 1999, and the repurchased in 2001, and then sold again to CNET in 2004). They are experienced in user interface design and building apps that will appeal to everybody from a casual user through to developers, and so far they have done this well.

Calendaring might be a very crowded space, but 30 Boxes have managed to distinguish themselves well and I would rate them as the best contender to take on CL2 when it is released by Google. 30 Boxes are constantly releasing new features and improvements which you can keep up with at their blog.