Mini-preview: 30boxes.com

There seem to be a million and one Web 2.0 / AJAX Calendar sites lately these days so it was encouraging that my initial impressions of 30boxes.com (terrible name aside - February only has 28 boxes!) was good enough to start putting personal calendar details in it. The a-ha feature of 30boxes is natural language processing / a ton of heuristics for understanding descriptions of events so you can just type "meeting February 12 from 4 to 5 pm +joe@example.org" will enter it in the calendar and send an email to the person. I'm not sure I'd want to type in all my appointments this way though. Maybe a del.iciou.us style "Add to my calendar" bookmarklet that allowed you to highlight text about an event or an email plugin would be a better way to exploit this. I was more interested in the slick way that 30boxes integrates with other Web 2.0 services - you can integrate with Flickr photos (highlights when photos were taken in the calendar), display your Upcoming.org events, Yahoo Weather for the current week (historical weather would be nice) and integrate any RSS feed (so you can see when it was published). Since most of these are Yahoo! services, I won't be hugely surprised if this service gets acquired by them. Of course, you can subscribe to your calendar as an iCal file from a calendar aggregator like Apple iCal or Mozilla Sunbird. They are apparently working on an API so you should be able to publish events into the calendar which might make application integration as I mentioned above considerably easier.