Thursday, October 29, 2009

Web 2.0 Pick of the Day: 30 Boxes

Thanks, once again to the facilitators of the Web 2.0 course I am taking for today's Web 2.0 Pick of the Day. Today, I feature 30 boxes, an online interactive calendar that can be shared among a number of participants.




The 30 boxes online calendar tool is simple, yet has enough features to make it worthwhile. Participants can collaborate on adding to the events on the calendar. Events can even be generated automatically from RSS feeds. You can use the drag and drop functionality to move events around the calendar. I could see great value in this tool as a simple online family calendar, a teacher's calendar of due dates, or a calendar for after school groups. I know for our school musical, there are dates for different groups to rehearse, days for the crew to meet, and of course all of the full cast rehearsals and shows.

While playing around, I found at least two added features that I really liked. One is the built in task list. You never can have enough 'Things to do' lists floating around. And finally, and maybe the best feature...When you register, you enter your zipcode. 30Boxes automatically includes and updates the 5 day forecast.

I am not sure if it includes all of the functionality of something like the Google Calendar, which my family uses. We especially like the Google Calendar as it allows you to color code and superimpose a number of calendars on the master calendar. We can see our whole family's ridiculously busy schedule all in one place :)

Try them both out. I am interested in hearing your comments.


1 comment:

Mr. Clark said...

Hi, Steve.

You might care to examine another useful program: DropBox (getdropbox.com), a free (paid options available) way to manage a set of files when you use multiple computers (a work laptop, a work desktop, a home computer -- and more). It creates a folder on each machine you want to share files with. As you add/delete/edit files on any one machine, the changes are "pushed" to the others. You need do nothing to accomplish this -- it happens automatically, and very quickly. I've opened a free account and installed DropBox on my tablet, my Mac desktop at work, two Macs at home, and even my iPod Touch (free app available from iTunes). A free account is 2GB in size. It can eliminate the need for carrying a USB thumb drive from one machine to another.

John Clark