Comments for 30 Boxes Turns One: Review of a Best of Breed Web App

30 Boxes Turns One: Review of a Best of Breed Web App

2007-02-06T08:40:27Z

The 30 Boxes blog celebrated today the first anniversary of their product launch. The online calendar space has been a tough one, ever since Google released its calendar app in April last year. But right from the start 30 Boxes has been recognized as an innovative app and not just your usual Outlook clone. 30 Boxes takes great pride in being only 3 people, but managing to not only foot it with giants like Google and Yahoo - but out-innovate them. I asked one of the 3, Narendra Rocherolle, to tell me about the user growth and product milestones 30 Boxes experienced in 2006.

Product History and Overview

30 Boxes began as a fun project for 3 people behind Webshots, the online photo app sold to CNET Networks in 2004. Nick Wilder, Julie Davidson and Narendra Rocherolle started getting excited about "a way to share schedules and life bits in a way that would dramatically broaden the notion of a calendar." 30 Boxes launched 5 February 2006 and immediately captured the interest of early adopter bloggers and mainstream magazines like PC World.

In terms of stats, 30 Boxes currently has 80,000 registered users and gets around 30,000 unique sessions per day. It also has some 50,000 outside RSS feeds under management. As can be seen from the following chart, a snapshot of 30 Boxes' stats from Aug 06 to Feb 07, growth has been steady (the dip was over the holidays):

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Product Development over 2006

Here are some of the core technology innovations of 30 Boxes:

Natural language parsing and integrated ajax event entry
Shared profile information (a bit like wikipedia) and open web discovery for personalization
Permissions and sharing around tags
Remote hosted themes allowing users / developers to control the look and feel of the application with css and images on their own local machine or web server

One of the common factors of 'web 2.0' apps is that they iterate and release upgrades frequently. 30 Boxes is certainly proof of that - Narendra told me they have been releasing upgrades, fixes and enhancements "on nearly a daily basis for the entire year." 3,504 code changes on 244 unique days, to be exact. Narendra says this has engendered a loyal and passionate user base. The upgrades include calendar enhancements such as extensive repeating events, blog badges, myspace badges, drag and drop, rss/ical syndication, internationalization, web calendars, event import, colored tags, colored feeds, colored buddies, ongoing improvements to natural language parsing, tag management.

30 Boxes also has API support, Firefox plugins, OSX widgets, email integration, IM based interface (IMified), mobile access, a webtop view, several sync apps in development, and many other things (too many to list here!). One thing of note is that they are currently developing Facebook integration.

The main point is that 30 Boxes has been busy developing their product to fit into all parts of the Web ecosystem. From a user perspective, it's hard to beat the variety of calendar functionality that 30 Boxes offers.

Where to next for 30 Boxes?

The company has decided on the following new tagline: "30 Boxes lets you connect with the people who matter most". Over 2007 and beyond it will increasingly be targeting the mainstream demographic in college and "post-college" people.

As for the competition with Google, 30 Boxes feels that continuing to be the "Best in Class calendar app" is their strong point. They want to provide "a much broader and innovative set of features" than the average online calendar, including Google's, because they believe that applications that focus on personal organization are "changing dramatically from the world of Outlook and its derivatives (Yahoo, Google Calendar, et. al.)".

It's that sort of attitude from the 30 Boxes team, as well as the product's impressive set of (useful) features, that endears 30 Boxes to me. I tested it out for a while when it first came out, but I must admit I slid across to Google Calendar in mid-2006 - simply because it was convenient and integrated with my email app of choice Gmail. But I will be giving 30 Boxes another shot, after hearing of their goal to be the best-of-breed in online calendars.

Comment from Adrian keys on 2007-02-06

2007-02-06T13:18:31Z

Great that they can maintain what seems to be a decent and relatvely successful product without an elaborate structure.

I would think though that the daily fixes are a warning sign that things are not all that well. Did not get a feel for how the company monetizes and what plans it had for rraising cash.

Comment from Narendra on 2007-02-06

2007-02-06T15:29:55Z

Richard,

We very much appreciate the coverage and the praise. I thought it might be appropriate to comment a bit more about the Google Calendar launch and its impact. In our first month we had a large number of early (and I mean early!) adopters who we knew would not necessarily turn out to be long term users because many of these folks are either "oversubscribed" or have too much of an Outlook mindset. We have been outspoken about 30 Boxes not being for everyone ;-)

The Google launch was long anticipated and accelerated the departure of many of these folks. We saw a lot of our numbers take a dip in for the last couple of weeks in April, but then gather momentum again and continue to climb. I believe in some ways gcal solidified 30 Boxes as both the underdog and the alternative which we enjoy quite a bit!

In the last few months we are starting to see more posts online which are very much like this one.

http://upnorth.org/2006/12/20/best-calendar-getting-better/

Those early adopters now switching back.

@Adrian: we have a long history with consumer web applications and the first thing you can be certain of is that all code has bugs and the more people that use your product the more bugs are exposed. Our general approach has been to fix them immediately. And I mean literally immediately -- in some cases within 5 minutes of a bug being reported in the forum. A large amount of code changes have also been new features and UI enhancements.

Regarding money. We have been approached by many VCs in the last year but have not seen fit to go down that road just yet. As we are not only the founders but also the developers our investment has primarily been our time. In fact, we have not been very focused on growth because we are trying to build out a fairly complex suite of services before having to deal with the friction of scaling.

2007 should see many more enhancements including a lot of work on allowing 30 Boxes keep you informed about things you "might" want to be doing. If we carry our momentum forward someday we hope to be ad driven with highly relevant, local, and time sensitive text ads, but there is a lot of work to be done before that!

Comment from Fred on 2007-02-06

2007-02-06T16:43:35Z

I'd love to use 30B, but I won't until there's a way to sync calendar data with my handheld. Telling me to use the mobile access doesn't work if I'm somewhere without wifi. Sync's been "in development" for a long time now, and their hope that others would write the sync apps using the API doesn't seem to be panning out.

Comment from Chas on 2007-02-06

2007-02-06T19:13:09Z

Narendra,
It'd be interesting to hear what platform and implementation technology you're using. After all, it has some part in enabling your agile development and deployment habits, right?

Comment from Chas on 2007-02-06

2007-02-06T19:17:09Z

...More particularly, meaning whether you're using any particular framework (above PHP) or have any interesting supportive homebrewed tools.

Comment from Albert Gedraitis on 2007-02-06

2007-02-06T19:22:14Z

You've whetted my curiosity. I have iCalendar on my MacOSX desktop but I like a current-month calendar on the frontpage of my 5-pages blog refWrite, as the month wanes I add the next month below it, having left the two earlier months until last month's becomes redundant.

But somehow I can't shake out a glitch that should be a simple
matter of correct CSS/HTML coding that puts, when I have all
three months online, a space between the initial Sunday row and the next Monday row (the other rows lign up neatly close in order. Because the problem destoy the symmetry I want, I am look for a calendar where I can add live links to blog-entries for civil dates, Christian liturgical calendars these come in several varieties, and the liturgical calendars of other religions for good-neibor and ecumenical reasons.

So, you see that my calendar/s are functional and integral to my blog. I want to solve this glitch immediatemente. I'm going to check out 30Boxes directly. One question already nags? What happens on the months where there are 31 days?

Yours, Sempaphor on behalf of Albert

Comment from brklynsurfer on 2007-02-06

2007-02-06T22:08:42Z

I use 30boxes.com every day early and often. I was one of those early adopters who thought Google would have something better in a few months. Well, when Google's calendar app came out I spent about 5 minutes with it. 30boxes is so easy, and intuitive that I went back imediatly. Its a rich web application that feels feather light.
30boxes is not for everyone. But if you want to break away from a web-app that tries to be outlook on the web (see g-cal), then give 30boxes a spin. You will not be disappointed.
Also the other side of 30boxes that I like is the buddies. Basically is a social web-app, keeping tabs what your friends and family are up to online and in the real world. The to-do list is killer. As you can see i can't say enough good things about this web-app. A couple of things i would like to see are the week view ( which should be coming shortly) and off-line access that Fred alluded to.

Comment from Narendra on 2007-02-06

2007-02-07T00:38:35Z

Chas,

A lot over our initial overhead late in 2005 went toward building a framework for our PHP implementation (user and db classes) so it is fairly custom. We didn't feel like jumping onto Ruby just yet and enjoy a lot of PHP hackability. Our last project (Webshots) was initially done in Perl so we are having a good old time compared to that.

We use Linux/Apache/MySql and generally will map a table to a single php class (extending our db object). And we don't do "join" statements.

We have written a lot of custom javascript as well and some of the few outside stuff we have tried often had bugs. We do use some of Yahoo's js environment which is solid but not very approachable/friendly.

A lot of the front end stuff has been made up, tested, rewritten on the fly. Very similar to the early web days because of the new flexibility with js, dhtml, and xhttp requests.

I think our agility is primarily the product of experience in solving similar problems and also comfort level working together (for Nick and I the primary engineers).