I’ve been tooling around the 30Boxes application for a few hours now and I’m already hooked. There are a number of ways to categorize 30 Boxes. On the one hand, it’s a web based calendar and on the other hand it’s a social networking tool. Then again, it’s a personal information aggregator. It’s also a time management application. This baby does it all

Practically speaking though, everything is centered around the calendar functionality. You can create and list any number or type of events on your personal calendar. Nothing groundbreaking there. Watch out though, because it gets better.

30 Boxes has some sort of an aritficially intelligence behind their event entry system. So adding a birthday is as simple as including the word birthday in the event entry field. 30 Boxes will then ask you if you want to repeat the event and will also prompt you for the year. That’s not all. You can specify the date (or dates) for an event by using standard characters that we all recognize for dates. For example, if you have a business trip from April 1 to April 4 you can enter “Business Trip 4/1 - 4/4″ and the application knows to spread the event across those dates while still keeping them connected. Very nice feature in my opinion.

You can added more details to each event if you like, including a description, tags and reminders. You can also invite people to the event via email from the event detail window. More on that in a second. The reminders can be delivered to you via email or text message. It’s always nice to have options.

I mentioned earlier that 30 Boxes is also a social networking tool. Just like other networks, you can invite people to your calendar. 30 Boxes calls them “buddies”. You can control if your buddies see your calendar and they can do the same. You can also opt to have private entries that no one else can see. I like the level of control so far. You can make connections but you have privacy options. There’s also a convenient list of your buddies in the upper left corner. The tagging features make it easy for you to highlight important calendar items. Items also can have multiple tags. This is something that I find very helpful.

Rounding out the social networking features is the ability to syndicate your calendar using RSS feeds. Each user’s settings includes a page that gives a variety of options for publishing their calendar using RSS. You can publish the entire calendar or exclude private events. You can also create “custom views” using your tags. There are also options for importing to Outlook, iCal or javascript to include on web pages. These are very nice options for syndication.

Finally, I want to point out the personal information aggregation features that you’ll find in 30 Boxes. Each user’s profile includes options to enter information for their instant messaging, Flickr and MySpace accounts. You can also add information about their web page plus an RSS feed.

Entering this information automatically captures relevant items into your calendar. Entering my wife’s Flickr id automatically captured her Flickr icon to represent her 30 Boxes buddy icon. Entering the RSS feed for my wife’s photo blog resulted in the addition of an RSS icon for each of the posts to her photo blog. Clicking on the icon gives you a preview of the post with a link to the real thing. Very nice feature.

The feed link also includes thumbnails of any public photos uploaded to Flickr by your buddies on that date. I could see this getting very cluttered if you have a dozen contacts with Flickr accounts so I’ll be keeping an eye on how a user can manage these options. For now, I think it will work for me just fine. I added the RSS feed to one of my podcasts under my profile and sure enough, RSS links to those items show up on the calendar as well. Information aggregator indeed!

My final thoughts are these. So far so good. 30 Boxes is a very robust and shareable solution for people who need to manage events and share them with friends. I’m initially setting this up as a calendar for my family but I’ve already started adding work events for my family’s information. I wouldn’t recommend abandoning your primary calendar just yet. But I do recommend that you try out this beta version to see if the many features of 30 Boxes are right for you.

[tags]Social Media, Networking, Web 2.0, 30 Boxes[/tags]