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.