SpongeCell, an Ajax Calendar

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1. Steve Rubel
   

   January 30th, 2006 at 3:31 am

   And where are Google, Yahoo and MSN? Somehow I have to believe they are working on this stuff.

2. Michael Arrington
   

   January 30th, 2006 at 3:35 am

   Steve, I love the fact that you are just getting up, blogging already, and I’ve yet to go to bed. The next few hours are all yours.

3. aaron
   

   January 30th, 2006 at 3:48 am

   planzo.com is an interesting one

4. Paul Watson
   

   January 30th, 2006 at 3:56 am

   Agreed with aaron. I have tried some of the others but find planzo.com the best. It is not much to look at but it works. I used Trumba for awhile but prefer Planzo.

5. Bill Boebel
   

   January 30th, 2006 at 4:34 am

   At Webmail.us, we bundle an Ajax calendar with our email hosting product. And just this week we started including it for free with Webmail Lite (http://www.webmail.us/lite).

6. James Webster
   

   January 30th, 2006 at 5:26 am

   Consider also Joyent (http://www.joyent.com ), as part of the mail+calendar+contacts+discussion space.

7. Bill
   

   January 30th, 2006 at 6:18 am

   Thanks for the review. Still looking for an online calendar with a smooth good looking interface. Perhaps that’s what is taking Google so long in releasing their’s.

8. Mark
   

   January 30th, 2006 at 6:22 am

   I say this with every ounce of snarkiness I can muster:

   How the hell can you have a Web 2.0 product and embed that much text in images??

   WTF. You want people to find your app and find it usable? You’ve got a closed door on search bots and spiders.

9. Bill Minton
   

   January 30th, 2006 at 6:23 am

   Didn’t TechCrunch write about http://www.zimbra.com before? Don’t they fit into this category? I’ve not used it, but I sat through the flash demo of how it works/what it does.

10. Colin Donald
    

    January 30th, 2006 at 6:34 am

    Has any one of these attempted to resolve all the issues around time zones? ie Changing times automatically if the user is travelling and/or the others who are viewing the events live in different times zones and so need the adjusted times and dates automatically presented to them.

    See Stowe Boyd’s recent rant - Calendars Don’t Work (and my comment):

    http://www.stoweboyd.com/messa.....dont_.html

11. Michal Stankoviansky
    

    January 30th, 2006 at 7:41 am

    Either these “calendar companies” are not interested in gaining users from Europe or they all just keep forgetting to add an option to set Monday as a first day of week. It just looks weird to me to have Sunday at the very left side of the calendar. This is the third AJAX calendar app I’ve seen not having this feature at all.

12. Dorrian
    

    January 30th, 2006 at 7:52 am

    It’s time for a Techcrunch name contest. Naming is hard these days, but there are some great ones and there are some horrible ones.

13. Brian Breslin
    

    January 30th, 2006 at 7:55 am

    Can somone just release a simple open source one of these so i can drop it into one of my apps?

14. Bala
    

    January 30th, 2006 at 7:56 am

    I hope they build in good integration points to hook these calendars into the desktops. As a end user, I would want to view/manage my calendar from within netvibes (my preferred desktop) than to have to go to different websites for my calendaring needs. I hope application developers have widgets/gadgets in their near-term roadmap. That would also be the quickest approach to building a large userbase.

15. Fred Oliveira
    

    January 30th, 2006 at 8:21 am

    Holy crap. How can these developers announce a product that is so obviously in very early stage development?

    Usability is close to 0, it honestly looks bad compared to other solutions out there, and I can’t see the value of a pre-packaged stand-alone online calendar solution anymore. I’m sorry, but this is my honest opinion.

    But, they do have the fashionable launch party, so what do I know.

16. Taylor McKnight
    

    January 30th, 2006 at 9:26 am

    Fred: You forgot that it isn’t even compatible (makes it crash) with Safari yet, though they are upfront about it.

    It gets into that whole when to launch thing, but I would still err on the conservative side than the alpha side.

17. rishi
    

    January 30th, 2006 at 11:07 am

    where does HipCal fit into this whole thing, i thought it was AJAX or ruby or something.

18. Charles
    

    January 30th, 2006 at 11:24 am

    I just love this ajax hype, everyone is blogging about it. I can’t wait to see an ajax calender replace the famous outlook/exchange combination.

19. Steve Dunham
    

    January 30th, 2006 at 11:33 am

    It doesn’t seem to handle recurring events. (e.g meeting every wednesday at noon)

20. Jon Gales
    

    January 30th, 2006 at 12:02 pm

    It has been TechCrunch’d:

    Application error
    Rails application failed to start properly”

21. Bony Boy
    

    January 30th, 2006 at 12:08 pm

    Another vote for Planzo. I am slowly becoming a big fan of that site. SMS reminders too!

22. Alan
    

    January 30th, 2006 at 12:31 pm

    This looks like a potentially dangerous security risk, if you ask me. Break into the calendar to learn exactly who will be where when. When your house will be empty. When you will be home alone. Maybe even when you will be walking around in a dark and secluded place.

    I wonder if anyone but me thinks of these things…

23. Andrew Hollister
    

    January 30th, 2006 at 2:11 pm

    Am I wrong (missing the link) or do we sign-up for Web 2.0 apps sight unseen???

    I just can not get excited about this without a single screenshot showing me how wonderful looking this app is??? Mind you their sponge icon is nice, but c’mon.

24. J
    

    January 30th, 2006 at 3:50 pm

    You should also consider Plans - http://www.planscalendar.com/ - its a very good full featured calendar.

25. David Beach
    

    January 30th, 2006 at 6:06 pm

    No one gets it. We don’t need another Ajax calendar. A calendar can do so much more!!
    A true Web 2.0 calendar is going to break convention of what a calendar is. It’s not about keeping track of your time or events, that’s obvious. It’s about everything else. I’ll leave it at that.

26. PeteCashmore
    

    January 30th, 2006 at 6:16 pm

    Interesting. Not sure if NLP is any use to me though - is anyone leveraging structured blogging/microformats for these purposes yet?

27. John Green
    

    January 30th, 2006 at 6:40 pm

    I was excited to see that spongecell can import iCalendar events, but unfortunately only by uploading a file from the file system.

    Our Nuvvo eLearning Service, http://www.nuvvo.com/, publishes events in iCalendar–but our users are not likely going to download the file and then upload it. They would have to do this everything their events change, which pretty much defeats the whole purpose. You should be able to subscribe to a URI of iCalendar events.

    Michal, regarding the start day of the week–you might be pleased to know that our Nuvvo calendar will change between Monday and Sunday depending on your language.

    Colin, all the dates in Nuvvo are stored internally using the Java Date object, thus we are always respectful of time zones, and all dates are rendered correctly for the viewer depending on their chosen time zone. I don’t know much about Ruby on Rails, but wouldn’t it have a similar facility? Doesn’t everyone do this?

28. Luke Kanies
    

    January 30th, 2006 at 7:29 pm

    I just tried this calendar out, and like Kiko, I just don’t see the point. It might as well be a desktop app for all the advantage it takes of being online — you can’t subscribe to iCal files, so it’s basically useless.

    I’ve been using Airset for a couple of months now, even though it’s got a pretty horrible interface, just because it gives me publish and subscribe for iCals, and it does SMS notifications (which is the only kind of notification I ever use).

29. Ashish Bogawat
    

    January 30th, 2006 at 7:36 pm

    For me Hipcal (http://www.hipcal.com) takes he cake as the most user-friendly online calendar application out there. Just beats me why it doesn’t get the kind of hype all these other applications are getting!

30. Jay
    

    January 30th, 2006 at 7:41 pm

    Google will be launching this soon.

31. Avi Bryant
    

    January 30th, 2006 at 9:22 pm

    Why all these calendars with such identical feature sets? Where’s something that can, for example, handle multiple tracks or rooms (like for planning a conference)? How about something with really sharp print output (PDF generation?) for groups that like to tack paper to the wall? I’ve heard both of those requests recently from companies I work with and didn’t have any good answers for them.

32. wald
    

    January 31st, 2006 at 3:00 am

    I love these ajax-type calendar apps and I’d love to set one up on my own server. Unfortunately, all the mentioned alternatives don’t open up their sources, which is their good right.

    Does anyone know similar projects in the open source area?

33. Gtox
    

    January 31st, 2006 at 3:09 am

    too bad netvibes doesn’t know how to deal with the rss-feed that spongecell is producing

34. Brad Root
    

    January 31st, 2006 at 3:53 am

    No recurring events in SpongeCell?

    Jeez. None of these calendars hold a candle to Hipcal, even with it’s sometimes slowness… Also, SpongeCell runs really slow, feels very chunky, and it’s pretty ugly. Kinda sad. Will keep looking at the others though.

35. Scott Mace
    

    January 31st, 2006 at 8:01 am

    I’ve been using Planzo, but the team behind it hasn’t been doing much with it. From the look of things, I expect it’ll just disappear one day.

36. Craig F.
    

    January 31st, 2006 at 2:57 pm

    Nice work. I am impressed!

37. cosmo
    

    January 31st, 2006 at 3:28 pm

    Recurring To-Dos are available with KOrganizer. This comes with any Linux distributions that have the KDE interface or utilities.

    The newest version is 3.5. To-Dos are a little buggy in 3.4 and earlier versions when dealing with recurrence.

    Also, the recurrence feature set is pretty rich with KOrganizer, eg, every third thursday of the month of September, every 4th year.

38. Kun Gao
    

    February 2nd, 2006 at 3:36 pm

    I use Planzo a lot, and i’ve actually email suggestions about the site and get responses back very quickly. They definitely seem dedicated about the site

39. Sponger
    

    February 2nd, 2006 at 4:34 pm

    Some of you are missing the point. What the sponge is offering that is different is NLP that simplifies data entry. No one else has got this down although admittedly it doesn’t work flawlessly. What it does do is allow me to stay in touch with my call from anywhere I have cell service which is something outlook can’t do for me. It also allows RSS feeds and has a cool drag and drop that major AJAX calendars have yet to offer. I say let them continue to iron out the bugs (add recurring which they have promised as coming soon) and keep the sponge on the radar.

40. Evan
    

    February 6th, 2006 at 4:21 pm

    Microsoft appears to be getting on the iCal bandwagon in Windows Vista - http://www.microsoft.com/windo.....endar.mspx

41. rishi
    

    February 6th, 2006 at 5:49 pm

    30 boxes calendar is amazing. Easily the best out there. You should also look at Hipcal…i thought that was pretty cool.

42. cem
    

    February 13th, 2006 at 3:11 am

    Planzo is good. It look likes a Google company, because of design. I´ve thought i´m at the login page of Gmail

43. HotJiminy
    

    February 20th, 2006 at 7:46 pm

    Ajax Smayjax

44. treelife
    

    February 28th, 2006 at 10:57 am

    surveyFacile.com is another good one.

45. don law
    

    March 8th, 2006 at 11:37 am

    I think the integration into Gmail will be a big plus, but it’ll be interesting to see if Google tries its hand at the Natural Language Processing and mobile integration that Spongecell has employed. Overall, its the ability to update and recieve through mobile NLP that sets spongecell apart from the others on the techcrunch list. either way it’s clear that calendaring has the attention of the blogosphere.

46. Mohammed
    

    March 8th, 2006 at 5:29 pm

    Don’t forget http://www.rememberthemilk.com

47. Ross Becker
    

    March 10th, 2006 at 10:24 am

    I’m looking for a good web calendar, but I don’t want to do it as a service. Ideally it would be AJAX, something I can install on a server at my company, able to accept and send exchange-compatible meeting requests, and capable of talking to an AD/LDAP server to get a list of other people to invite to meetings. The problem I’m trying to solve is half the company uses Exchange, half the company uses UNIX IMAP solutions, and outlook’s web access for calendering sucks…. Any suggestions?

48. bernie
    

    March 15th, 2006 at 6:18 am

    Do any of these AJAX calendars sync WITH outlook? Sad to say, Im using O2k3 as my email app, and it syncs with my clie ux50 and I’ve been using y! calendar to maintain a rough “sync” btw my desktop and laptops. So what i need is a web calendar that syncs with outlook…

49. David Jones
    

    March 17th, 2006 at 7:24 pm

    Airset syncs with outlook. I’m not certain about the others.

50. bruno lefebvre
    

    June 5th, 2006 at 10:20 pm

    Great website! Bookmarked! I am impressed at your work!

51. Klara Soft
    

    June 16th, 2006 at 5:46 pm

    It’s my first visit to your website. After just a quick browse, I’m really impressed!

52. Josu`-carlos Cardoso
    

    July 12th, 2006 at 8:44 am

    Did you hear about the teacherDid you hear about the teacher who was helping one of her kindergarten students put his boots on?He asked for help and she could see why. With her pulling and him pushing, the boots still didn`t want to go on. When the second boot was on, she had worked up a sweat. She almost whimpered when the little boy said,”Teacher, they`re on the wrong feet.” She looked, and sure enough, they were. It wasn`t any easier pulling the boots off than it was putting them on. She managed to keep her cool as together they worked to get the boots back on - this time on the right feet.He then announced, “These aren`t my boots.” She bit her tongue rather than get right in his face and scream, “Why didn`t you say so?” like she wanted to do. Once again she struggled to help him pull the ill-fitting boots off.He then said, “They`re my brother`s boots. My Mom made me wear them.” She didn`t know if she should laugh or cry. She than mustered up the grace to wrestle the boots onto his feet again.She said, “Now, where are your mittens?” He said,”I stuffed them in the toes of my boots…”

53. John Hancock
    

    August 29th, 2006 at 4:04 pm

    What’s the problem with ’software’? There seem to be no groupware calendars which run on any hosted solution (LAMP, WIMP etc). All for the sake of the ’start free, build userbase, then charge’ model.

    Still, as far as AJAX/Ruby stuff goes, people seem too busy using XMLHttpRequest and thinking they’re special! Now, where’s an open source calendar that lets you do team planning, holiday management and multiple track appointments, with or without these pastel shade and free hype? Not found one yet.