Yo, Yo, Yo, Check This Out, 30 Boxes Builds a Kick Ass Calendar Mash Up Machine

Ok, so maybe a 38 year old father of four (that would be me) shouldn't be using the phrase "yo, yo, yo," but this is very, very slick.

Narendra Rocherolle just shot me over what is the best mash up widget I've seen all year. Basically 30 Boxes has built a way for you to embed a calendar using just about any RSS feed anywhere you'd like. If you check out the calendar above it is a mashup between a 30 Boxes calendar and my Flickr RSS feed showing photos by date taken. So by looking at the calendar above you click through day by day to see what Thomas Hawk was up to. This is a fantastic way to showcase your photography (similar to Flickr's own archive calendar) that you can take with you wherever you want to go.

In addition to the size above Narendra told me that he is building a mini version of the widget that you can put in your sidebar. This version will then open up in a lightbox when you click on it.


The potential applications here are super cool. You can put this on your blog as a widget to showcase your photography, but the implications go much beyond photography. Let's say you have a group at Flickr, SF Flickr Social (who are meeting at 7pm at Crossroads Cafe tonight, by the way) for instance. And you want to put a calendar in your group description showing when you are going to have group meetups. You could just build the calendar at 30 Boxes, publish the widget and then paste the html code into your group description template.

Coolest of all, the widget is dynamic. So when you update your photos on Flickr or your calendar at 30 Boxes or whatever, it will dynamically change wherever you have published the widget.

This mashup is the best portable calendar I've seen yet. And there are so many applications for it that I haven't even thought about. It will be interesting to see how the creative minds out there put this to use.

After looking at this I know that at Zooomr we are definitely going to build an RSS feed specifically for this widget where it can show your photos by date on your blog.

In addition to the theme above, 30 Boxes has a number of other themes you can use for your calendar including default, Gmail Blue, Flickr White, or Small+Stylish. You can add multiple RSS urls into the mashup to get multiple things on your calendar. Lets say you want your flickr photos + your upcoming info. Or your flickr photos + your blog posts. You can use this widget to say put all of your friends upcoming events on a calendar on your blog and there seem to be so many other cool ways it might be used. It works with Blogger and WordPress and Flickr and Vox and ical and RSS and has a cool auto discover feature that you can use to try it with any url.

Being able to publish calendar mashups anywhere is damn cool indeed.

Although a lot of people talk about Google Calendar blowing everyone else in the calendar space away, it's innovation like this that is going to keep companies like 30 Boxes around as contenders.

Congrats to Narendra, Julie and Nick on another awesome feature.