Time for a calendar revival

Posted October 7th, 2008 at 9:00 pm by John Kremer, Yahoo! Mail

 22 Comments / Filed in: Trends & News

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. Even the world’s most popular online calendar, Yahoo! Calendar, sees only a mere 8 million users per month.

So why, you may ask, is Yahoo! launching a new Yahoo! Calendar after ten years and why will it be better than your paper calendar or (gasp!) your desktop calendar? Because we think the time is right for these Web-based scheduling applications to finally take off. Here’s why:

• Open standards like iCalendar and CalDAV make all online calendars work together so people can share their schedules without the hiccups of the past.
• Broadband and mobile device ubiquity means you’re always connected, even if you don’t like to admit it. You need your busy life to be in order and for your calendar to be accessible wherever you go.
• Web 2.0 technologies have made it possible to incorporate very cool visual effects and practical functions like event discovery.

Thanks to the powerful technology that our Zimbra team built, and our involvement with the online calendaring community, we’ve been able to add some much-improved technical functionality to the new Yahoo! Calendar. Now you can better connect with your friends and family –- even those who aren’t using Yahoo! Calendar. Our new calendar is interoperable with the other popular services, including those from Apple, Microsoft, AOL, Mozilla, and Google, so you can share your upcoming plans and important dates with friends.

With the new Yahoo! Calendar you can:

• Subscribe to any iCalendar-based public calendar and add upcoming events and show times to your Yahoo! Calendar. This means you’ll be able to plan for a local concert when your favorite band comes to town and you’ll know when the next new episode of “Lost” will air.
• Easily drag and drop events to reschedule appointments without having to refresh your Web page.
• Set email, IM or SMS reminders for important activities and never miss a birthday or anniversary again.
• Personalize your Yahoo! Calendar with interesting photos from Flickr to make your online calendar as visually appealing as it is productive.

And this beta is just the first in a series of updates you’ll see coming from us. Imagine being able to download your favorite sports team’s schedule, your class schedule, or your child’s t-ball schedule and being constantly on top of everything. That’s coming soon, along with additional event discovery features, including integration with Upcoming.org and other Yahoo! properties. And soon your Yahoo! Calendar will even auto-synch with Outlook and your iPhone.

So if you’re looking to be even more connected with your friends and family and never miss an important appointment, sign up for the Yahoo! Calendar beta at http://switch.calendar.yahoo.com. We’ll be adding users from this list over the next few weeks. And check out this screencast of the new Yahoo! Calendar, narrated by our product manager Herbert Wang.

John Kremer
Vice President, Yahoo! Mail

Tagged: news, yahoo! calendar, yahoo! mail

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22 Comments Add your own

Joe B. | October 7th, 2008 at 10:45 pm

I almost was about to set up camp elsewhere that .ICS was supported. I’d given up hope to see Calendar updated in my lifetime. And now, just as I was about to turn in for the night, I am able to spend the next hour checking this out.

You’ve made at least one guy happy.

GuillaumeB | October 7th, 2008 at 11:51 pm

Ah!!! great that’s some good news… i’m really excited about this announcement. Been waiting for a long time!!

Jigar Shah | October 8th, 2008 at 3:10 am

By any chance it sill open in same window as of new Yahoo Mail ?
And as mentioned in switch website intellsync won’t work and birthday / anniversary is yet to be updated when ? Please don’t tell us another decade. I am also missing List view. Is it going to come back any soon ? I am looking for something which tells me “all birthdays in my calender”.

Thanks for updating calender in this century.

Veronique | October 8th, 2008 at 8:56 am

Congrats to the Calendar team, this is great!

Ron D | October 8th, 2008 at 11:10 am

It looks nice, but I would really like to see SSL for the entire session available for both mail and calendar. Until that time, I will need to stay away. Today it is just too easy to have your session cookie stolen.

Ben | October 8th, 2008 at 11:38 am

How “soon” exactly will we get iPhone integration? I’m desperate for it!

Joe Hunkins | October 8th, 2008 at 12:28 pm

Sounds like a fine plan, though I think Yahoo should start guaranteeing that applications will be supported indefinitely. Yahoo Mash folks lost all the work they put in. It’s easier to port a calendar but people want to know that after they learn this it’ll stick around.

John Roberts | October 8th, 2008 at 1:44 pm

Will the calendars in Yahoo Groups see the same functionality? How long?

Ashkey | October 8th, 2008 at 3:02 pm

Great news! It will be a great resource :)

=bg= | October 8th, 2008 at 4:29 pm

using FF3. Doesn’t seem to display right. For example, I have at 7:30pm, “Take Pill.” It ends up looking like
7:30p (and ten half the letter m,) and Pill shows as Pil.

Gabriel | October 9th, 2008 at 5:36 am

New problem I’ve noticed - it’s changed my time / date settings for my calendar strip in Yahoo Mail. Even if I enter an event at 10am UK time, in the YMail calendar strip it displays it in Pacific Time (2.00a).

Also, it has inverted my calendar day/month format in YMail calendar strip. UK standard is to use day/month. Now it’s flipped back to month/day - quite annoying.

Otherwise the new interface is GREAT!

Dave | October 9th, 2008 at 6:09 am

This is fantastic. Looks like exactly the right approach and just what I’ve been looking for: open and well designed.

Though when I click “Get Started” is says “The new Yahoo! Calendar Beta doesn’t work in your language yet.” This happens with English versions of both Opera and Firefox on Mac OS X.

michelito | October 9th, 2008 at 12:21 pm

All I get is the following message:
”
The new Yahoo! Calendar Beta doesn’t work in your language yet. The team is working around the clock to translate everything in your language. ”

Is it doing geolocation and seeing that I’m in Canada, refusing to let me in because I don’t speak “english”???
:)
That’s hilarious (not really…)

John Kremer | October 10th, 2008 at 10:55 am

Thanks for the feedback, everybody.

@John Roberts: On Yahoo! Groups integration, we are working to update the Yahoo! Groups calendar with similar functionality, but will not be rolling that out until after we finish out beta testing period with Yahoo! Calendar. Unfortunately, we don’t yet have a date to share since it is dependent on the feedback we receive.

@Ben: Regarding iPhone synchronization, we are working on it and are excited about the potential there. This is dependent on some additional CalDAV work on Apple’s end, but we hope this will be available once we finish our beta test and announce general availability.

@Jigar Shah: Yahoo! Calendar does open in a new window for now, but we are planning on merging it closer with Yahoo! Mail by GA.

@Dave, @Michelito: As Herbert noted on the Yahoo! Mail blog, “We only support US, IN, UK right now. It would seem like we should just support all english countries but actually there is a lot of variation in how times and dates are specified. we’ll be expanding out more soon.”

@Gabriel: Reposting what Herbert noted on Yahoo! Mail blog: “Thanks for the report. We are seeing issues with UK and the calendar strip. The first problem you reported doesn’t sound familiar actually but we’ll look into it.”

Rob | October 16th, 2008 at 6:34 am

These new features sound great but please fix the program that syncs your Yahoo calendar data with MS Outlook! I am constantly told that I’ve deleted 700+ appointments from Yahoo and asked whether I would like to delete said appointments from Outlook. I don’t want to delete the appts from Outlook so naturally I check the box that says to add them to Yahoo. This creates duplicate appts on Yahoo, so now I have lots of appts listed dozens of times.

All the pretty UI enhancements in the world won’t keep me using Yahoo Calendar if the calendar sync can’t sync correctly.

Neill | October 16th, 2008 at 4:27 pm

What I’d like to be able to do is to set up my Yahoo! Groups calendar so it sends out an email reminder to the group members which includes a clickable link. We are a cycling group and we send out reminders for our rides and would like to include a link to the map for the ride.

Tony | October 20th, 2008 at 5:40 pm

I get the error “The new Yahoo! Calendar Beta doesn’t work in your language yet.” even though I am located in US. Any ideas?

Samsul | October 20th, 2008 at 10:10 pm

Great progress!

Martin | November 2nd, 2008 at 1:34 pm

I just wish the new calendar was available on Yahoo! Canada…

Cory | November 8th, 2008 at 6:50 pm

Years ago I built a Zimbra server for my boss… it worked extremely well, never crashed… (Unlike the “other” mail server I had to replace). Since Yahoo’s purchase of Zimbra, I have been waiting for this day… only then do I find I don’t speak the right kind of English! (Canadian)

PLEASE hurry!!!

I have been forced to use other calendars… just waiting for you to get your calendars up to speed. (I am excited, because they look to be better than what the others have to offer!)

I have been one of your biggest cheerleaders for years. I refuse to use MSN, Hotmail, Gmail, and anything else that the web has to offer… well everything else except the calendar.

By the way, Yahoo! IM is so much better than MSN, (and has been forever) the little emotes are so darn cute.

GWebb | November 19th, 2008 at 2:45 am

I’m really excited about sharing a group calendar ical.

olip | November 19th, 2008 at 5:17 am

Nice ! but too bad the synch feature comes latest. I already asked the Yahoo! team 4 years ago for this and it is certainly, for me, the one feature that made me choose airset(http://airset.com). Free, everything fully integrated (mail, mobile, blog, web, calendar, contacts), it’s open (iCal compatible since day 1) and so easy to use.