30 Boxes is an online calendar application that is targeting the mainstream consumer market who until now have not adopted calendaring online or offline. 30 Boxes is another contender in a very crowded market (as previously noted on Techcrunch) which has recently confirmed Google as the latest entrant (also seen on Techcrunch). 30 Boxes has some strong differential points and the team has implemented some great ideas that make online calendaring simple to use. I have been using it for over a week now as my primary scheduler and have been impressed enough to continue to use it. My previous attempts at online calendaring using some of the other apps now available (Kiko, CalendarHub and Airset) all failed after a few days, but 30 Boxes is hanging in there for me. 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 → Read More