30 Boxes, an online calendar project created by 83 Degrees, has just gone into a live beta. 30 Boxes isn't your average online calendar; it adds social networking into the mix. You can add friends that also have 30 Boxes accounts. This overlays your friends calendar on top of yours. If you have events you don't want others to know about, you can keep them private from your friends. Similar to Facebook, your friends need to ask you to view your calendar, so strangers can't look at your schedule. It wouldn't be a great Web 2.0 app without a fantastic design. The calendar looks great and performs well - you can resize your window as you please and the calendar adjusts accordingly. However, cooler than all of this is what Thomas Hawk said:
Not only do your buddies scheduled events show up on your calendar (if you choose), but so do their Flickr photos, their Upcoming.org events, and even their blog posts. Merely by typing in their email address 30 Boxes goes out and fetches the RSS feeds for Flickr photos, upcoming and it even found my Blogger Blog.
Since 30 Boxes is online and has its own feed, you can subscribe to it with in iCal! Extremely nifty in my mind. All of these features in beta, I can't wait until final comes around. Go ahead and make your own account here. You can add me to your buddies: paul(dot)stamatiou(at)gmail(dot)com.
Here are a few screen caps I took of my account. However, I could only capture so many features, it's much more impressive in person. 30 Boxes currently supports 3 themes: OS X Gray, Gmail Blue and flickr white, all of which can be changed on the fly.
