Its been a while since I wrote about 30 Boxes (read my review) and a lot has happened with one of my favorite online calendar apps. Narendra Rocherolle got married. The threat of Google Calendar became very real. 30 Boxes had a little hiccup due to transition to beefier servers.
Why? Because things are going well for the service. Seven weeks after the launch, they are doing about 130k page views a day. 30 Boxes has had 1.25 million user sessions, with each session lasting about nine minutes. “We have more than 35k registered users and 20% have been to the site in the last day” says Rocherolle. “The syndication of mini calendars on blogs and the likes is growing a very long tail of referrers.”
The best news – they are about to add iCal subscriptions, and are planning to open up their API so folks can write their own sync apps. But meanwhile for TV addicts, there is a brand new custom TV schedule feature, thanks to a mash-up with evokeTV. Narendra tells us how to add favorite TV shows to you 30 Boxes.
* Sign up with EvokeTV, make a schedule for the stuff you like, and you can choose new shows.
* Take the RSS feed for your Schedule from the EvokeTV, and copy the location
* Go to 30 Boxes, and in your settings click the “Web Stuff” and add paste the Evoke TV RSS link. Hit Add.
* That’s it. Shows info and small previews will appear on your calendar.
This brings to mind an article I read yesterday about how web 2.0 needs to get over itself. Does 30Boxes really expect the “average” web user to get an RSS feed from EvokeTV and import it into their 30Boxes? I don’t want to sit on the sidelines and criticize but isn’t there a better way? I’m pretty web savvy and that still sounds like a lot of work. Can’t they have some kind of two way API between the two sites?
Web 2.0 is supposed to be about integration and a “rich” user interface right? And I think it’s been established that sites that are easy to use have been the most successful (see: netvibes, craigslist). I think it would benefit a lot of these websites to make things as easy as possible for the average user so that they can get some penetration outside of the techcrunch crowd. Personally I like 30Boxes, but integrating it with outlook etc has been a bit of a chore. I’m interested to see how many people take advantage of the new evoketv partnership.
Joel,
We definitely do NOT expect the average web user to hunt down an RSS feed from EvokeTV. In fact, the average web user will not even be a user of EvokeTV!
The average web user doesn’t even use “popular” Web2.0 apps like Flickr.
Even so we have made it fairly seemless to add Flickr, Webshots, and others simply with a username.
The bottom line is that we are having fun and trying to put out ideas and interface concepts that challenge the norm. We want creative people to help illustrate what your “calendar” might do for your and EvokeTV is on such example.
I can’t understand why I would go to one site for my schedule, another for email, another for file storage, another to create a document. These things are currently linked together in desktop apps for a very good reason. A calendar without an associated email client means you have to switch apps (sites) to invite people to a meeting, for example.
The Outlook issue is important because it addresses offline access. We felt we had to build an full Outlook sync utility (email, contacts, calendar)into our app early on for this very reason, otherwise we’d lose the business traveler market. If I’m offline and get a call to schedule a meeting, what good is an online calendar to me?
30 Boxes is a nice thing but in my world we have to sell hundreds of thousands of business owners on SaaS and these are the issues they always raise.
Remember, 30b isn’t for the hard core business user! We will soon have email scheduling so you could actually write an email and send it to 30boxes and based on your subject actually set up a meeting with lots of folks, put it on your calendar, and attach the body of the email to it…
I saw a post on EVDB labs to subscribe Eventful within 30boxes sounds like another useful mashup of 30Boxes. (Spotted in the Wild: Eventful 30boxes = crazy delicious). http://labs.evdb.com/
Yes, these web 2.0 calendars are still lacking something. Though I have been quite happy with 30Boxes until now for my basic needs I am still waiting for Google to come up with something better that I can use along my Gmail. Since yesterday I have been checking out the new version of Kiko Calendar which doesn’t seem that bad at all. What do you think about it Om?
What would be useful is a way (plugin?) for Outlook to pull 30boxes in. This way one could sync to a Treo or something similar and I can just carry that around with me.
Nevermind, I just found Remote Calendars. Now off to try it.
http://www.amountaintop.com/30boxesintooutlook
jauder
looks like they are working on something – not sure when it comes out and what it does. it works nicely with ical though