30Boxes as an identity-based aggregator ?
Narendra Rocherolle was good enough to brief me a couple of weeks ago on the upcoming beta release of 30Boxes (as in – the UI has 30 boxes/dates), the calendaring application developed by 83Degrees – the new startup of the founders of Webshots.
Thomas Hawk has done a great job detailing the functionality of 30Boxes (a recommend read) and calls it “the best calendar ever”. Beyond the fact that 30Boxes is a great, easy to use calendar application, I found most interesting the ability to create and aggregate identities of people in one’s social network, before (or even without) that person actually using the service. Upon creating “someone” through a an email address, it is possible to input a lot of their identity proxies: blog feed(s), flickr/upcoming/myspace/… ids, etc. Displaying someone’s calendar on a page shows icons and pieces of content extracted from their feeds/sources, allowing me to see what they have “published” (in the largest sense) on a given day.
Up until now, you would track someone’s whereabouts through an RSS aggregator – especially if they were to use a FeedBurner spliced feed of their blog, photos and bookmark links. But no service has aggregated such a comprehensive list of sources to date, which goes way beyond calendaring in this instance. Like any well designed social application, I am getting a lot of value out of the system in “single user mode”, that value increasing as I connect to other users and get access to their own calendar private or restricted information.
I have had a long discussion with Narendra about potential usage patterns of 30Boxes. As often, the initial use case for the product was Narendra, Julie and Nic’s personal needs to synchronize their respective activities – mixed with their knack for innovating. Om sees 30Boxes do to calendars what GMail did to email. I actually see 30Boxes as a meta identity aggregator, going across content services and identities.
I agree with most of Stowe’s functionality suggestions, with the addition of an import, or even better, synchronization with my Outlook calendar – this would be a feature I would pay for just because of the convenience it brings since I do not have the time to enter my schedule in two different systems, or try and figure out if they are in sync. Another feature request is the ability to browse around tags/events: for example, I would like to see which users of 30Boxes is attending Demo 2006, and allow me to send an invitation to get together.
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