With the rollout of Google Calendar (GCal) today, I thought it would be a good time to post that calendar update that I’d been promising.

In my first review, I had compared Planzo,, Spongecell and 30Boxes. All had strengths, but 30Boxes was the clear winner because it had more of them. The only thing missing was the ability to receive reminders via SMS.

The 3 Contenders

• Spongecell: This would be a great calendar for someone who centers their lives on a mobile device. It works much better as an application used from a cell phone or PDA than it does from the web TO a mobile device or RSS feed. To their credit, however, after my first review I received an invitation to try their private RSS feed beta, which I did. However, the feed didn’t send through enough information for it to be useful.

  I also asked Dancergirl to try it, figuring that she would be a good representation of an “average” adult user — someone who understands calendars but is relatively new to the idea of SMS messaging or RSS feeds. She gave up on it as too complicated and hard to figure out. When I pressed her on it, she said that when she used the “easy entry” it didn’t go in as she expected. This is a problem with all of them, but evidently Spongecell doesn’t think like Dancergirl.

• Planzo: I don’t especially like Planzo’s interface. It’s a busy layout and seems to be trying to appeal to MySpace-rs. It does have the ability to customize the color scheme and religiously emails the schedule daily. Email is my least favorite way to receive calendar notifications, though, so that doesn’t impress. It does have a notebook and ToDo list integrated into it. However, they’re not on the same page as the default calendar view, which means three clicks to see something I like all on one page.
• 30Boxes: Since I last wrote about 30 Boxes, they’ve added all of the features that I wanted. The SMS notification feature is completely reliable — I receive my notifications at the exact time that I specify. My only wish for them is that they’d include the notes I put on the calendar, because those notes generally have a contact phone in the entry so that I can confirm or call in when it’s a phone meeting.

  The sharing options are complete. I added the RSS feed to my Google start page and set it as my home page. Whenever I start up my browser my 30Boxes calendar is right there listing the next five appointments I have.

  Since using 30Boxes, the only appointment I have missed is one that I used Outlook to notify me about. Had I added it to 30Boxes, I’d have been present and accounted for, even at an ungodly hour (for me, anyway).

  Dancergirl and T have also set up 30Boxes calendars at my request. Dancergirl loves hers. Sticks hasn’t had time to make his yet, but he will — that’s his “next weekend” project. I’ve also added one to the band website and placed the generated code on the sidebar so that the events are automatically updated on the site. That worked so well that I created one for the church, too, and the dance school will also be done this month. All of these calendars can be shared with my calendar so that I see an overview of all events/classes/appointments on one page and can add those feeds to my Google calendar.

The final verdict

30boxes wins, hands down. Every feature I want in a calendar is there. The automatic Google Maps and linking features are just gravy — everything else is neatly contained in one nice pretty package. It is a powerful tool to keep busy lives as organized as possible, and flexible enough to share or keep private, depending upon your preferences.

Why try Google Calendar?

I set up Google Calendar tonight because I use GMail and was curious to see how the two would mesh together. Of all the Google apps, GMail is one that I could not live without, no matter what. GTalk is rapidly becoming another one with the fattening of AIM and all the stupid ad/video/audio stuff they have attached to their client. I like Google stuff because it’s generally very lean and mean.

Google calendar is nice. It’s got all of the features that 30Boxes has. There is a feature to add comments to entries, which would be handy for keeping notes on phone meetings or online discussions. It will also recognize appointment info in GMail and provide an “Add to GCal” button. But that’s about it.

It does have the ability to pull in other web calendars, but when I tried to grab the feed from 30Boxes, it returned an error. Since there’s no problem with any of the other feeds, I’m assuming the problem is on Google’s end and involves the fact that the only format it will currently import is the iCal format (which 30 Boxes does provide). Since it’s brand-new, I’m willing to give that a shot again later.

If you choose to share your calendar, it becomes nakedly public, and part of Google search. No thanks to that, but if you’re an organization where that is desirable, it could be a plus.

My verdict: I’ll use GCal to do a quickview of my 30Boxes calendar feed when it works, but don’t plan to migrate everything to Google Calendar at this point — 30Boxes is too reliable and easy to use to make the switch and Google hasn’t given me a compelling reason to do it.

Technorati Tags: calendar, review, gcal, google calendar, spongecell, 30boxes, planzo

Update: I was able to import my 30Boxes Calendar by creating a .csv file and importing it into GCal. An inelegant solution, but one that worked as a temporary fix. An XML/RSS feed into GCal would be a better way.