Online calendars have been around for more than a decade, and they’re tightly integrated with the leading Web mail services used by more than 680 million people per month (as of August, comScore). So it’s surprising to see how few people are actually using their Web calendars. A new beta of Yahoo Calendar brings it in line with the Internet giant’s other services, which have already been made over with more interactive Web 2.0-style interfaces. Offered today in five countries—the US, Brazil, India, Taiwan, and the UK—the new Yahoo Calendar is an opt-in beta. Yahoo’s new calendar works from directly inside Yahoo Mail, but interested testers need to register for the beta at a special site.

Yahoo! Calendar is a feature within Yahoo! Mail. Leveraging last year’s acquisition of Zimbra, the new Yahoo! Calendar is built on the Zimbra platform using the iCalendar (iCal) and CalDAV3 standards. The new calendar is interoperable with other online calendar services including those from Apple, Mozilla, Microsoft, AOL and Google, so users can share their calendar data with friends who use other online calendaring services and subscribe to any iCal-based public calendar. Other key features include calendar zoom, for viewing calendar entries; Web 2.0 drag-and-drop; color-coding; a “to do” list; invitations and RSVPs; and the ability to set e-mail, IM, or SMS reminders for calendar activities.

Thursday, October 9th, 2008 at 3:40 pm | by Kur-nia-one |