Since I posted my shoutout about calendars online, I’ve had the chance to try out a few more.

I started with Spongecell. There’s a lot to like about it, including the ability to use my cell phone to “sponge” my appointments for the day or week via SMS. I also liked how easy it was to enter events, and that they could be done via my cellphone or the internet. However, the RSS feed didn’t work for me — it would give me a feed but didn’t have my entries on it, so each day was blank. To me, getting this stuff via RSS is one of the major reasons to use a web-based calendar rather than Outlook. I played around with the feed but ultimately just wasn’t getting enough joy to keep going with it. I also really need a way to color-code entries which wasn’t available to me.

Sneadwoman suggested 30Boxes the other day and I vaguely remember reading about it on Techcrunch and Robert Scoble’s blog not long ago. We’d had a discussion about it at work too, but in the context of the discussion it didn’t strike me as something I’d like much.

I WAS WRONG. MEA CULPA. This app is the equivalent of Flickr for calendars. It’s very Ajaxy and Web 2.0, but if this is Web 2.0 then I want more. It is everything I love about Flickr and blogging rolled up into something that seems like it was made for me.

Starting with the data entry: I can enter an appointment in one line and tell it that it’s recurrent. I can tag it and color code it in that same line, so that if I wanted to set a reminder to take dancergirl to class every thursday and have my entry appear in green AND tag it so that I could look at all similarly tagged entries, I would type in

“3/2 3:30pm dancergirl class thursday repeat tag dancergirl tag green”

30Boxes would know that I want that entry to repeat every thursday at 3:30 pm and the entry would be green.

Syndication: Dancergirl could subscribe to the ‘dancergirl’ tag via RSS and/or email so that she was able to see the calendar as well. She can have her own calendar that can be mashed up with mine, too, or she can just enter her own stuff into mine. They have code snippets so you can include your info on your Ajax home page if you use one (and I may now have to consider using one to bring together my feeds, gmail and calendar).

This is slick stuff. Anything you want to put on any day (to-dos, memos, notes, whatever) can be there.

You can bring in your Flickr and blog feeds so that one day’s journal entry has everything you might’ve posted to those along with your calendar all in one place.

The only thing that is missing from my wish list (and this is in development) is the SMS capability. It looks like they’re getting close with it — there are preferences to set cellphone number and provider so it’s probably not too far away from reality.

I would pay for this, for the same reasons that I have a paid Flickr account. A great product deserves to be supported. If the price is reasonable (and I’d assume this would fall somewhere in the Flickr price range), it’s worth paying purely to support the developers. They’re publishing an API so that other cool inventions can be made with it.

I don’t often rave about web apps, but this one gets five stars from me as it is, and if other cool uses come out of it the way the Flickr world has evolved, it will be one of my killer apps for the year. I highly recommend it.

Technorati Tags: 30boxes, calendar, ajax, web2.0, spongecell, techcrunch, robert scoble