Many people by now should be familiar with Google Calendar. The benefits of having an online calendar are obvious: Not only is a web calendar computer-independent, but it’s also easily shareable with other people. With the World Wide Web maturing in its technology, web apps are getting even snazzier than the desktop equivalents that we’ve become accustomed to. In fact, considering how many of the Web’s latest offerings are free, this new trend may begin to throw existing successful apps out the window. Who needs Microsoft Office when you’ve got Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Gmail (which, after all these years, is still in beta, strangely enough), Thunderbird, and the rest of Mozilla’s and Google’s software arsenal?

But it’s not just these two giants that are coming out with nice software. You’ll miss out on some nice gems if you don’t look past Mozilla and Google. For this article, I’ll review some of the free web calendars I’ve tried, and we’ll see just how Google’s calendar stacks up with the rest of them.

Google Calendar

My friends and I have been using Google Calendar for the past few weeks, and I must admit that it’s pretty easy to use. Events are easily created and modified with mouse drags and clicks, and users can share their calendars with anyone with a Gmail account (although the calendar can get very cluttered when viewing all your friends’ calendars at once). You can group events and appointments into separate categories by specifying multiple calendars, and color coding makes calendars easily identifiable.

A look at Google Calendar

One drawback to Google Calendar is its printing feature. Printing from the webpage itself results in an ugly format, while clicking the printing icon displays a non-customizable PDF file with an expanded view of your events. Microsoft Outlook has the advantage in this respect, as Outlook provides several different options for printing the calendar.

Kiko

Kiko! This cutely named calendar looks and acts very similar to Google Calendar, although it has its good points and bad points. It’s worth mentioning that Kiko uses standard XHTML. As useful Google’s products are, they have a habit of not following web standards, which isn’t a good trend to set for others aiming to learn and mimic the search engine giant. Right off the bat, I see that Kiko sports a prettier printable format. While not too customizable, it’s bearable enough for me to not want to change it. (The printed events fit nicely on one page, unlike Google Calendar’s, for example.)

Kiko Calendar’s Weekly View

Editing your calendar is just as easy as in Google Calendar, only perhaps Kiko’s default options are much more desirable. (New events in Google Calendar default to having a 15-minute reminder before the event. Kiko’s events default to no reminder.) One feature that Kiko has over Google Calendar is its ability to subscribe to RSS calendar feeds. For example, adding holidays to your calendar is as simple as adding Apple’s web calendar feed to your Kiko calendar.

Unfortunately, Kiko is early enough in its life to be filled with a few bugs, such as tags not showing up to your events and events not saving correctly. Still, Kiko looks very promising, as its developers add new features frequently. Users can even submit bug reports or feature requests through its “feedback” button on the calendar page.

30 Boxes

30 Boxes—clever name for a web calendar, isn’t it? 30 Boxes is just as functional as Google Calendar and Kiko, yet some may prefer 30 Boxes for its customizable themes, integrated to-do list, and “webtop” page that includes a few more neat features. However, perhaps as a consequence of its attempt to make adding events as simple as possible, its options for adding detailed information into events isn’t exactly as straightforward as the previous two web calendars.

30 Boxes Calendar

30 Boxes’ default theme is OS X Gray, which makes the calendar look very iTune-ish. 30 Boxes also offers “Flickr White” and “Gmail Blue” as alternate themes, and if that’s not enough, ambitious users can submit their own designs to 30 Boxes’ Forums and try them out.

Adding a new event either via the simple text box on the top of the screen or via the “detailed entry” mode takes a bit of getting used to. Typing phrases such as “Birthday Party Sunday 12pm (bring a gift)” into the search box will generate events into the calendar for you, but it’s not so easy figuring out what to say to get 30 Boxes to generate the event you want. As for the “detailed entry” mode, I still can’t figure out how to specify an irregular recurrence (such as an event that repeats every Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday).

Conclusion

There are a few more nifty web calendars floating around the Web, but instead of continuing to review more, I’ll give you the pleasure of discovering the rest on your own. As for the three I’ve just described, I think I like Kiko’s calendar the best. Adding events is wonderfully simple, and the extra options such as specifying a URL for an event makes Kiko’s calendar that much more useful. I can associate my class lectures with my professors’ webpages, for instance.

The to-do list that 30 Boxes offers is very appealing, but adding events isn’t as simple as it is with Google or Kiko. 30 Boxes makes a great effort to enrich the user’s experience with features, though, such as the ability to map events using Google Maps, the ability to publish your 30 Boxes calendar to a blog, and a “webtop” page, where you can customize what icons to add to a dockbar on a desktop-like page. Interestingly enough, one of the default icons that you can add to a 30 Boxes’ webtop page is a link to Google Calendar.

While Kiko’s calendar may have won me over, for most users (especially Google lovers), Google’s calendar may be the best option to use, since it’s the least buggy of the three, and it’s integrated with all of Google’s other services. However, Google could learn a thing or two from its competitors, such as considering adopting an XHTML DOCTYPE, providing customizable themes, better printing functionality, and additional options for specifying event information.