I've used Yahoo! Calendar forever, preferring an online solution that I can access anywhere to Outlook or some other program that resides on the computer. While I remain loyal to Yahoo! in several departments, I believe that as of today I have used Yahoo! Calendar for the last time.
One of the beauties of Google's calendar is the intelligence it brings to the Quick Add feature; the inherent intuitiveness reminds me of Google Maps and Local. In all these cases, Google can take a word string that contains the user's essential need, and deliver the hoped-for result. So, a Quick Add of "lunch Jack, 4/22 1:30pm" embeds the appointment accurately in your calendar. With your settings loaded to spec, you'll get a Gmail pop-up reminder, or an e-mailed one. (Text messages can also be auto-sent as reminders, but with Verizon conspicuously and inexplicably missing from the provider list, I could not test this feature.)
Logged into Google Calendar through the Google account (which is keyed to the Gmail account), the user is invited to set up multiple calendars, and share them publicly or semi-privately. And if weaning yourself of an Outlook or iCal habit seems too wrenching, Google accepts imports of preexisting calendars in those formats.
The standard Day/Week/Month format is enhanced in Google by an Agenda view, which lists events in free-flowing style, off the calendar grid. A short-term view, set by the user for a certain number of days, keeps the near future in clear focus.
The site is clickalicious, springing to life with each mouse bite. In fact -- perhaps the page's responsiveness is somewhat oversensitive, but that's Web 2.0 for ya. I definitely prefer the speed of 2006-style interactive coding to the clunkiness of static calendar pages.
The upshot? Yahoo! -- it's your move. Google just hit a grand slam, and you're down four runs. Try Google Calendar here. Check out numerous screen shots (74 and counting) of Google Calendar here on Flickr.
1. It is pretty nice and it can easily import calendar events from Outlook in CSV (Excel) format. However, I would really like a way to automagically sync my Outlook calendar on a periodic basis. Even better would be a way to filter on events to sync such that, for example, only personal items get synced between Outlook and Google. This way, I can maintain the business events in Outlook and personal events in both Outlook and Google. Now that would be a very usefult thing.
Posted at 2:34AM on Apr 13th 2006 by Marc Abrams