30 Boxes

History

The website was founded on August 1, 2005.

Features

The website supports drag-and-drop capabilities, one-click editing, plain-language event adding, as well as unique features aimed towards social networkers. Calendars can contain feeds from Twitter, Blogger, MySpace, Facebook, WordPress, Vox, and Upcoming.org, which generates a social timeline listing all of a user's recent online activity. Users can also import and export data as ics or csv files, or as an RSS feed. The website includes a plain-language event adding feature, which allows users to type phrases such as “Drinks with Richard, tomorrow, 7-9pm, Flute and Whistle”. The website then translates the phrase into an event, determining the location, time, date, and description. Users can add buddies and share calendars with them. 30 Boxes features a simple webtop, which summarizes daily appointments and to-do items. Users can also add applets to the page, such as Google search, Yahoo! Mail, and Google Calendar, a competing online calendar service. 30 Boxes also offers a mobile version of their calendar.

Reception

Barry Collins of The Sunday Times appreciated the website's plain-language event adding feature, but did not appreciate that he was unable to see more than one month of events at a time. Collins was also unhappy that the website was not capable of warning him when he had two events scheduled at the same time. In a list of the best web-based calendar software for small businesses, Forbes ranked 30 Boxes second, after Google Calendar. They described 30 Boxes like “buying a new car with manual transmission and lots of extras—you don't just want to drive it, you want to fool around with it to see what it can do”.