Facebook just released their new applications product. And it is quite simply amazing. Facebook has become the first well implemented web based operating system. No one has any reason at all to leave Facebook now… everything can be done through it’s new platform.

It’s incredible.

I happened to be on the output point of Windows Live blogs at msreadr.com today, and I caught wind of an update to the Live Mail feature set that was live/going live at the time. Code named M7 I think. One of the features really caught my eye, it said that they were adding checkboxes. Now this isn’t an odd feature for a mail application what I thought was odd was that I hadn’t noticed they were missing when I first reviewed the product. But when I thought more about the interface that they have adopted it made more sense of course they hadn’t had checkboxes in their setup the messages are treated like much more square rectangles than anywhere else I have seen, and you are encouraged to drag them around rather than (I suppose) using checkboxes to select messages for movement. So I was sort of interested in how their checkbox implementation was going to work.

Luckily I have a Live Mail account that has a pretty constant stream of 6 or 7 spam messages every day flowing into it. So I have a place to play with the product, and mail to play with. I have to say it is a long time since I have seen anything as awkward as the way these checkboxes work. The first thing is that they are not always visible. They have them appearing in the place of the envelope which indicates whether a message has been opened or not when you hover over a message. So you hover over a message, the envelope vanishes and is replaced with a white square. Only on the message you are hovered over note, not the whole column. If you click at this point the box gets itself a green tick and when you move the mouse off the message it doesn’t regain it’s envelope icon. Instead the tick remains and it takes on a blue shaded background.

Here is the list of emails	Hover over the first email. Colour/Icon change.
Click the checkbox. Get a green tick.	Miss the checkbox. Lose your first tick.

Ok that doesn’t sound perfect, but it sounds reasonable in the circumstances. What is so hilarious? Well lets take a look at what happens if you miss the checkbox. It looks like you’re in luck, the message is still selected and gets it’s green tick like any other would. But the surprise is that any messages you have previously ticked on your way down the list marking the spam are automatically unticked. I have done some tests, and I havent been able to tick more than six messages in a row without missing one and losing the lot. This also means that when you have selected a message for reading just by clicking on it, the checkbox automatically gets ticked. Well this is no real problem, who cares if the box is ticked or not. Ok. Try this for a scenario. You check your inbox see you have an email from a friend and also four messages that are clearly spam. You click to read the message from your friend. Then you tick the boxes on each of the four spam emails and drag them to the trash can. Now you better hope that you notice that it says five items as you drag them over as your message from the friend will of course also be selected still. Oh heavens…

As an aside: the images above are real screenshots of the best view of the inbox you can get in Live Mail. Anyone else think it is just too limited? The information provided is cluttered with that terrible text overlap when someone’s name is too long. Compared to the snippets you can get in Gmail with the interface looking nice, it seems pathetic.

Another area that is hotting up like the calendars is the online office space. That is applications that allow online editing and saving of documents. These range from standard word processors up to spreadsheet applications and online slideshow tools. Systems like these are all set to become the next generation of office tools. The next Microsoft Office. As I write Microsoft are preparing their take on the scene. I am not sure of the exact name but I am sure it will have Live in somewhere, definately a beta, maybe a Windows too. Rumours are rife that Google is preparing a suite to compete with all of these services, and the recent acquiring of Writely only serves as evidence for this case.

At this point it is key to note that the race is still on. No one has made a full office system that works totally via your browser all locked up under a single login. I know a blog that is devoted to this one aim, where a recent victory was celebrated when for the first time every office service became available online. The next step is getting it all with a consistent layout and interface, with one logon, from one company. As you’d expect Google and Microsoft are the big names that are up for this. But there are smaller new companies that have started to offer office services. Some just offer one or two, but Zoho is going full out to cover everything. And whilst Google and Microsoft are preparing theirs, Zoho has some services online now. So you can go and word process online right now with ZohoWriter or plan events with ZohoPlanner or (coming really soon) calculate things, and organise data with ZohoSheet.

When I first heard about this online office idea I was skeptical. It would always be too jerky I thought for it to ever be reasonable to use. And when I found ZohoWriter I was anixious to see if it would be smooth enough to be usable. Let me tell you: it is. It is not exactly like Word. It is not as feature rich, it is not quite as intuitive and it is a little more jerky. But it is usable. And most importantly it works completely in your browser. ZohoWriter also takes advantage of its webbased position. Whilst it keeps in touch with the obviously dominant desktop side of word processing, allowing the import and export of documents (as Word or Open Office going in and as Word, OO or PDF going out), it also adds new functionality. It lets you share documents with friends and you can chose to allow them to view or allow them to contribute to the document too. This is great for group projects. But don’t worry about someone (even if they are a “friend”) deleting some content that you wanted. ZohoWriter supports versioning. Every save is saved with a version number and you can always switch back to any previous version in two clicks. The whole interface is written in AJAX to make everything super smooth and it is relatively bug free. The initial loading time for the application is significant. It even has a loading bar — but once it is done the rest of the processes are wait free. It supports tabs allowing you to have multiple documents open at once without windows all over the place and it autosaves for you. It has a great full screen feature that probably offers me more typing space than Word can. There are a few hitches with the import of documents and the loss of some formatting but overall it is what you expect — Word in your browser.

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The other two applications from Zoho that are directly linked with the office, that is the Spreadsheet and Planning services, are very similar. ZohoSheet is very new and is currently only in a private beta. When I tried it I found it to be impressive at first. Just like with the Writer product it seemed like Excel in the browser. But it lacked serious functionality. It could calculate things, and it could work with basic formulae. It however doesn’t allow for the extremely useful dragging of formulae or numbers across many cells to avoid lots of arduous work entering the same (or a similar) things again and again. It also can’t graph yet but I am told that this feature is on the way. I certainly hope so. It is much nicer to see your numbers in a picture than as endless rows of data. Again you can import data and you can share your ZohoSheet once you have it uploaded with or without write permissions. And again the interface is slick (and consistent) and fast. This product still needs a fair bit of work, and I do hope that it gets it, but then it will be brilliant.

ZohoPlanner is an older product. But simpler too. It is not really immediately comparable with anything that is found in Microsoft Office but it allows you to make day to day to do lists in a very neat way. It will add them to a calendar, remind you of events (if you wish), and produce page summaries of what you have going on. It is not by any means a calendar application. It is strictly centred around to dos rather than having boxes of days. I made a page quickly enough of things that I would like to do with my website and shared it publicly (i.e. with everyone). The page produced it this. It allows for comments on the list and when I have done one I can tick it off on the list. It is all very nice. Simple, but nice.

Overall I think that Zoho is a company that is doing great things. It is innovating in a space that is about to be hit by the web giants. But notice Zoho have beaten them to it, they are there now whereas the others are only coming soon. I hope that Zoho keep building and start to integrate their services into one suite. I know that would make Ismael very happy.

There are loads of web calendars out there right now. Most of them new. Most of them AJAX. Most of them very similar. Everyone is talking about the sudden crowding of this space. And it is perhaps funny to wonder: Why does everyone suddenly need an online calendar? Today I read an excellent piece about all these calendars. It said that all of these startups are aiming themselves at the same goal. With Google bringing out a web calendar in the future it is expected that Yahoo! will update their calendar offering and for this they may want to acquire an AJAX calendar startup. In the post this is compared with Yahoo! buying Oddpost when Gmail was released.

Now, Yahoo! might not buy a calendar service. They might be able to develop their own from scratch (although their are obvious time implications, especially if they havent started already). And it might be ace. I feel myself thinking that calendar apps cant be that hard to make if so many have sprung up so quickly recently. Or Yahoo! might decide that they want to buy one of these small firms. Note: one. That leaves the rest of the calendars fending for themselves. It doesn’t take a genius to realise that not all of them are going to survive.

I have recently tried out four of the calendar services. I chose what I regard to be the four biggest players that are all new companies, and all offering glitzy calendars. I signed up to and trialed:

• Spongecell
• 30 Boxes
• AirSet
• Calendar Hub

None of them are perfect. I have a clear favourite but I think each of the above have good and in every case some unique features. I appreciate that there are other calendars out there, but I wanted to compare very much like for like in a strictly controlled test. I used each calendar for a period and iimported a lot of events from a CSV so that I didn’t have to go through the process of adding hundreds of events to each service. So note that I am accepting at this stage that there are differences between each service. The interfaces differ. The features differ. The styles differ. I also noticed the following difference:

Spongecell:

30 Boxes:

AirSet:

CalendarHub:

Need I say it? There is a clear winner isn’t there? With 30 Boxes you get more calendar in your calendar. The calendar is simply bigger. This is so important. It makes the emphasis of the service clear I think. This is pretty much the big reason that I go for 30 Boxes over the others. It gives you a calendar. And a big one. And no other junk.

SpongeCell isn’t bad it is uncluttered with a menu at the side. It allows dragging and dropping. This seems a curious feature in my mind. How often do you completely change the date of an event and still keep the event the same (i.e. the same time). Not very often. Also the columns don’t keep a constant width which makes the whole thing look ugly. The one box to add your events is very powerful tough. It is very good at recognising what you are talking about and putting it in the right place. SpongeCell is also the only other service that provides the calendar squares as squares rather than rectangles. I think this is the more natural shape for them.

AirSet is something more than a calendar service. I have absolutely no idea what but there are buttons everywhere that must do something. It seems that the calendar is just some branch of something else. It is cluttered. And many of the buttons are images that makes things slow. The squares are rectangles and the calendar area is not very good. It is quite powerful though I am told. I suppose it depends on how you get into it. I found that it was fiddly and really perhaps too powerful.

CalendarHub was actually the first online calendar service that I ever used. I hated the huge amount of stuff in the pop up boxes for event entering. It doesn’t maintain equal column widths. It doesn’t have square boxes. It has a small calendar space. And unlike AirSet this is just a calendar so why is the space so very small? I don’t know. This is probably joint with AirSet as my least favourite of the calendars.

So not only does 30 Boxes offer the biggest area of calendar, and square boxes, and a simple technique (one box) for adding events. It also does a whole bunch of other things. Now I must admit at this stage I have not probed very deep in the other services. Some or all of this functionality may be available with some or all of the other calendars. In 30 Boxes you can completely change the skin. You can make your own if you like and then remotely skin the interface. You can also add “web stuff” to your calendar. That is any RSS feed. I have my bookmarks, my Flickr photos and a few other bits all streaming into the calendar. These remain subtle in the interface so they don’t cover up the actual events for the day.

So Yahoo! if you are reading this. And if you are thinking of shopping for a calendar in the near future then I have one recommendation alone. 30 Box it.

Riya ’s CEO announced on the 28th January in a brilliant blog post that Riya Beta was on its way. In the next few weeks. Since then they won a Demo God for their presentation at Demo 06 in early February. We are now a week into March. Five weeks since the initial few weeks statement. Where’s Riya?

Web 2.0 start ups all seem to have one thing in common design-wise. They all use non-pressable buttons. These are images that you can click to death but never push in. There are a few places that you can still pick up HTML buttons or other custom buttons that do react to being pushed, but the services that I use seem to be dominated by this button flatness.

(Clockwise from bottom: cocomment, riya, mabber, ma.gnolia, ma.gnolia).