Tuesday Feb 7 2006 - 5:23pm
30 Boxes Seems Sort of Silly
by Zach
under productivity, web
with 13 comments
Does the whole idea of online calendaring (like the recently much touted 30 Boxes) seem a little silly to you? I was talking about 30 Boxes (which is supposed to be the greatest calendar ever or something) with Brian and Mark Chang yesterday and I think we came up with some good points.
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Most months don’t have 30 days in them. Seriously, check your calendar, I’m not joking. And entering beta (or “launching” as it’s known for Web2.0 projects) during February seems like adding insult to injury.
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Who is their target market? Almost everyone who has a “real job” uses Outlook for their calendar because their job requires it. The others use Lotus notes. Is the market for web calendars unemployed people? Because they usually don’t want to pay a whole lot for a service… And they don’t have a lot of stuff to plan that would neccessitate a calendar.
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Social features do you no good without a community. Being able to add all sorts of information from other services is a neat feature and having an API is pretty cool. But unless I’m going to convince all my friends to start using it or exporting all their data somewhere it doesn’t really do me any good. I think the perfect place for this is The Facebook. It’s already got basically every college student in the US registered and addicted. Adding a cool calendaring feature would actually be really useful there.
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Strange choice of features. The natural language processing is cool when it works, and the skinning is pretty slick, but there are parts of the interface that bug me. There’s no drag and drop or right-click support, there’s no close box in the top right corner of popup windows, and getting to features that aren’t on the main calendar view can be a hassle. The mouse over drop-downs aren’t bad, but kind of a surprise the first time. Overall it’s pretty good, which just makes the little things even more annoying.
At least no matter what you say about 30 Boxes, it’s not as god awful as Kiko. Talk about a bad idea taken to extremes.
1
(aβ Member)
Hey, don’t rope me into your hate fest - I think 30 Boxes is a perfectly fine name. But the other points you’ve brought up are particularly valid, especially the lack of community. I’m not sure where this community is supposed to come from (Facebook would be _awesome_) but to me, that seems like the biggest caveat for success.
FWIW - 30 Boxes is one of, if not the best AJAX web calendar out there (I’d put Planzo up there as well), but that doesn’t mean it’ll get used over Outlook. Sad but true.
2
your 30boxes link needs a .com before the final /
3
(Post Author)
So it does. Fixed!
4
We do realize that there was a point when Facebook didn’t have a community right?
Do you also realize that Facebook has absolutely no community outside of the collegiate realm?
There a new company, I think it’s a fairly elementary conclusion that they are going to have to build community. You don’t just start with one.
5
It’s a small world. I caught one of your other posts getting linked to on another blog (http://ajaxian.com/archives/modal-dialog-lightbox-goes-wild) and follwed the link, and said “Hey, I almost know these guys” (Zach, via being an old xforums member).
I don’t know if 30 boxes fills this need, but actually not everyone does use Outlook, and there is demand for easier (if you are not using Exchange) online collaboration for scheduling/calendaring in the work-place. We actually just built a calendar for a client, because we couldn’t find anything existant that met their needs.
6
(Post Author)
edit: In response to comment #4.
That’s true enough, but trying to jumpstart a community by providing such a single focused product/service seems a little optimistic. Flickr has sort of pulled it off, but sites like MySpace and Facebook and Friendster (back when it was popular) offered a whole range of services and ways to interact. My first thought when I figured out what 30 Boxes was about was “Man, I wish I had this in Facebook” not “Man, I need to get all my friends to sign up for this”. It’s a neat product, but I think it would work better if integrated with a community site.
7
(Trackback)
Panasonic Youth
Ajax calendars, responding to Joel and alwaysBeta…
Joel Spolsky and the guys at alwaysBeta take issue with the new web 2.0 calendars…
……
8
(aβ Member)
So Zach, I haven’t tried 30 boxes yet, but I’d have to say that your first criticism is “sort of silly” as well. Catchy names are hard to come by. What does a calendar look like? A certain number of boxes. Which sounds better? 30 Boxes, 31 Boxes, 29.65 Boxes, 30or31butsometimes29or28 Boxes…
Since when have accuracy and marketing EVER gone hand in hand?
9
(Post Author)
Well, my point was more that defaulting to a view that shows 30 days at a time was possibly not the best choice. Weekly, daily or real monthly views might be more useful to the user. I think I just laid the sarcasm on a little heavy.
10
People who say the user interface for 30boxes is great and amazing and ooh and aah must be smoking crack (or work at a terminal all day long).
Stolen images, drop downs where you least expect them. Pop ups where you least expect them.
I had the same thought as Zach when I first started using 30 boxes. I though to myself “huh… only 4 months out of a year have 30. Wouldn’t 31 boxes be better?”
Either way, it seemed forced to me because we all know having a number in the title is good Web 2.0 mojo. At least it isn’t http://30box.es
11
A bit of an aside on calendaring in general:
What I’d like is more computer calendars geared at the international community - the week doesn’t start on Sunday for everyone. I still get confused with wall calendars when the first column isn’t Monday. Frankly, I think having Saturday and Sunday at the far right of the calendar makes more sense - it doesn’t divide the weekend in half, makes it seem longer, and encourages planning of two day events for the days that you’re probably most interested in planning out. (AND, it’s called the weekEND after all).
Furthermore, software/web calendars should take advantage of being customizable and let you change when the day starts and ends. I regularly work until 4 or 5 am and find it very annoying to have to span two columns with my “day’s” events. Last semester I made my own calendar to my own time/week specs and it worked beautifully. Each day started at 5am and the first column was Tuesday, as I had Monday mornings off and wanted to think of them as part of the weekend.
12
Not to stomp on your hatefest, but I kinda like 30boxes. Calendaring Suuuucks from linux. Evolution is a pile of poop; half the time it crashes while opening my calendar. Sunbird… don’t even get me started. I also use embedded devices. I also want access to my calendaring information on my website.
There’s some UI work to be done, but I actually like the general product so far. (and has zach ever found a website he did like?
)
- c
13
(aβ Member)
Hey Chris,
No, I don’t think so. I can’t ever recall Zach liking a webpage.