On Letting Google Win (Google Calendar vs. 30Boxes edition)

This month, I’ve been moving my calendar over to Google, away from 30boxes, which I’ve used pretty happily for three years.  If I recall correctly, 30boxes was around before Google’s Calendar, and was one of the first really workable online calendars, combining social networking, ease-of-use, and a slick design.

30boxes and Google Calendar have lots of features in common: multiple views, reminders, the ability to add events in more or less regular language.  My switchover has been reluctant–in fact, this month I’ve basically been maintaining both calendars in order to make sure I’m comfortable with this.  (Ultimately, it’s ease of use with things like Jiffle that is driving the switch. That, plus I’m a sheep.)  Before going, though, I wanted to point to a key difference between the two–one I actually think 30boxes handles better than Google: keeping areas of your life distinct.

My calendar distinguishes, in the main, between 3 types of events: CCSU (anything campus-related–teaching or not), union (duh), and family (including coaching and such–basically anything that happens off-campus).  Google handles this by letting me create sub-calendars for each one of these.  So, I have my main calendar, which has almost no native events, and then sub calendars called things like “AAUP,” “Family calendar,” and so forth.  This works . . . ok.  I can share or embed these pretty handily.  However, I can’t seem to use the “Quick Add” feature to add something to a sub-calendar.  Quick Add is thus more or less useless for me–I have to open up the main editing window every time, or remember to go back later and assign events to various calendars.  Also, all events in a sub-calendar look alike, because they’re color-coded.  Usually that’s nice, but a brother likes options.

Instead of separate calendars, 30Boxes handles this by tagging.  When I add an event, for example, I can write “Dept Meeting 3:30pm 12/25 (Willard 289) tag CCSU tag navy.”   This tells 30boxes what the event is, when it is, where it is, and how to display it (color it navy) and what kind of thing it is (campus-related).  Ok, a disadvantage of this approach is that I have to remember to add the tags, including the color.

But the advantages!  First: everything’s natively on the same calendar. That’s a more authentic metaphor, because, after all, it’s all the same hours in a day  It’s not as though I secretly have 72 hours to handle those three areas.  Second: if a meeting is of an unusual type, I can change the color to make it pop out visually.  Plus, 30Boxes has an “important” tag that adds a gold star to events.  The whole structure just makes more sense to me.

I don’t have enough of a social life for this to matter, but the key distinguishing feature of 30Boxes is the idea that you can share your life, not just your calendar.  So, for example, your calendar can display your Flickr feed, blog posts–basically anything with an RSS feed.  You can update your Twitter status. So if you have a group of people who are using it, then its utility scales dramatically.  If you’re the only one, though . . . .

If you are still shopping for an online calendar, I’d encourage giving 30Boxes a try. (I’m always surprised more people haven’t heard of it.)  There’s a powerful urge to just let Google handle everything, but to some extent that’s just laziness talking.

Do you use a different online calendar?  Do you have ninja moves for gCal that I should be trying?  Should I run back to 30boxes?

Image by flickr user pentadact / CC licensed