Google Calendar Live! And it disappoints (screenshots!)
I was just playing around and noticed that Google Calendar is live. I haven't played around much, but from what I've seen, it definitely doesn't change the game like Gmail did.
Personally, I think 30boxes is a much better implementation of calendaring online. 30boxes has the whole one-box entering thing down to a science (enter a full event into a small box and it just works), and their AJAX is perfect. Not to mention the whole fill the screen with a month view is awesome.
Google Calendar, on the other hand, has a little pop up to enter an event on the week view. Not bad, but not nearly as nice. Plus, the one thing I was expecting -- integration with Gmail -- doesn't seem to be there. :(
Without further ado, screenshots:
I'll play with this tomorrow and have more reactions, but I thought I'd show some screenshots first. For now, I'm sticking to 30boxes.
Personally, I think 30boxes is a much better implementation of calendaring online. 30boxes has the whole one-box entering thing down to a science (enter a full event into a small box and it just works), and their AJAX is perfect. Not to mention the whole fill the screen with a month view is awesome.
Google Calendar, on the other hand, has a little pop up to enter an event on the week view. Not bad, but not nearly as nice. Plus, the one thing I was expecting -- integration with Gmail -- doesn't seem to be there. :(
Without further ado, screenshots:
I'll play with this tomorrow and have more reactions, but I thought I'd show some screenshots first. For now, I'm sticking to 30boxes.
5 Comments:
Back in 1999-2000 I used to joke that Yahoo's strategy was, "Find what other people are doing, and do a 2/3-ass job reproducing it for Yahoo!".
In that vein I now believe that Google's strategy is "Find what other people are doing and do a 3/4-ass job with AJAX and Search!"
You know, that's a really accurate picture of the last few Google products (minus Finance, in my opinion -- though many disagree).
They changed the game with search, then GMail, then Maps... then...? Certainly Google Pages, Video, Calendar all didn't change the game.
Now they just seem to be moving things to the web, but without actually attempting to be truly innovative.
I'll line up to disagree on finance. The AJAX stuff is nice but how often do I really want to look at the exact price on an exact day in the past? Surely not often enough that a mouseover is the right way to interface it.
Compare that to two glaring omissions:
1. Google data seems to only go back to mid 2001, whereas Yahoo! has data from the mid 80s. Go to MSFT and get "max" data on both sites.
2. You can't compare two stocks easily like you can on Yahoo!
If you had $1000 to invest in the market the day of Amazon.com's IPO, would you put it in AMZN or MSFT?
Google can't give you an answer to this question because of missing data and even if they had the data their interface makes that very hard to do.
Yahoo on the other hand...
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?t=my&s=MSFT&l=on&z=m&q=l&c=AMZN
Yeah, that's definitely true. I started thinking about the reasons I like Google Finance and it was basically AJAX + search. Things which really pissed me off for years about Yahoo Finance were finally fixed (read: news events on the graphs of stock price + searching for stocks by name, not just symbol), which made me like the service. But, it's really just AJAX+search.
I also really enjoy seeing the integration with Blog Search, so that makes me like it more, too.
But, on the other hand, yeah, you're right. It doesn't really do much else than that and certainly the tools for actually comparing stocks are better with Yahoo.
I take back what I said. :-P
It seems as though Google is just attempting to become the portal everyone knows they are now.
I actually have to disagree on this one. I really can't stand 30boxes, to be honest. It's too web 2.0 in terms of design, too bulky looking; not simplified enough visually. Beyond this, I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that you and a lot of others are fortunate enough to have a broadband connection *le sigh*. I'm in an area of the States where I still cannot easily get anything faster than dialup. 30boxes, at least for me, is terrible on dialup; the lag is unbelievable at times, probably during peak usage hours.
One thing I really love about Google Calendar that I didn't notice at first was the multiple calendar feature. At first I took that to mean totally separate calendars, but it actually isn't like that at all. It creates multiple calendars with different color coding, then applies that to your overall calendar. You can check or uncheck certain calendars that you've created to view them one at a time or more. I uploaded a screenshot for anyone who didn't understand anything I just said. (Since it was said poorly, haha!)
As far as I know, 30boxes doesn't have that many features or capabilities, but it might, and I just might have missed it from my hesitance to use it.
One thing I'd love to see Google Calendar do is integrate contacts from Gmail to include their birthdays or other information. Google can really strengthen both tools if it wants, and I think integration of multiple Google features would be the way to do that.
Just my 2 cents. :)
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