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30 Boxes Does Mashups / WidgetsNovember 13th, 2006 by Narendra |
A while back we proclaimed we would make 30 Boxes even more open. We are making good on that with today’s release of 30 Boxed! What is it? A way to mash together all sorts of date based information onto a 30 Boxes calendar/timeline.
The kicker is, you do NOT need to be a 30 Boxes user to use the technology.
That’s right, similar to Google Maps, we are allowing people to create mashups (hybrid web applications). With 30 Boxed, in seconds you can convert a flickr account into a complete timeline. Heck you can combine a bunch of flickr accounts for a group view. The tool will try to find the data from any blog or flickr photos page and it accepts all RSS and iCal data as is.
The combinations are endless. Here is an example of the widget in Thomas Hawk’s blog.
The customization potential is extensive. We have our existing 3 themes plus two new ones designed for this tool and anyone is free to create and host their own theme. This means that instead of using clunky rendering tools for calendars, any organization can use our technology to publish a calendar!
The mashups can be linked to, embedded (widget) on a web page, or embedded (widget) with a super slick “View Timeline” badge that uses ajax to overlay a calendar as part of your own website.
We think “time” is a great axis or way to browse the web and we want to see what people build! Please post your photos to the flickr 30Boxes group and flickr central discussion, heck upload some videos to YouTube, post in our forum if you need help with customization.
We are already working on two useful examples. The first is a Wordpress plugin that lets you browse your entire blog on a calendar. It is functional on my blog. The second is a collaboration with a startup called Involver that is doing great things with social recommendations for local events. The plan is to be able to bring your 30 Boxes calendar into their application. More to come on that. Also on the development list is hcal microformats support so that simple web pages can be rendered in a rich calendar.
Tags: 30boxes, 30boxed, widgets, mashups, flickr, thomashawk, ajax, web2.0, timeline, involver, hcal, microformats
30 Boxes!
November 13th, 2006 at 12:17 pm
Wow, cool work, I can see lots of potential. Only one problem, I tried to make one using not my whole Flickr stream, but using an RSS feed for photos with a specific tag - the mashup worked without any errors, but the calendar seems to be ignoring the specific tag and just grabbing all my Flickr photos… Any ideas?
Thanks :)
November 13th, 2006 at 1:05 pm
Alex, you found a small bug. We’ll get on it!
November 14th, 2006 at 3:34 am
Amazing Work! Is there anyway to show pictures (ala 30Boxed) of flickr feeds in the regular 30boxes calendar. The calendar will list photo entries from the flickr rss feed (entered in the settings), just wondering if we can have it display one of the photos as well. Does that make sense?
November 17th, 2006 at 10:05 am
30 Boxed! Calendar Mashup.
So, what more could I possibly say about 30 Boxes? This fun and useful online calendar is getting better all the time. Now you can embed your schedule in blogs and websites and share your calendar via RSS, event lists, hCard, vCard, and create a R…
November 19th, 2006 at 2:14 pm
I am interested in integration similar to the involver integration.
November 20th, 2006 at 9:16 am
There seems to be a bug in how many items the widget will display. I’ve reported on the forums at
December 1st, 2006 at 7:16 am
It shows the pics in the calendar on the “date taken”.
I’d suggest to make this optional between the “date taken” or “date posted on Flickr”
February 14th, 2007 at 7:16 pm
It’d be great if you could point 30 “boxed” at a feed that specified dates in the natural language one-box style.
I was trying to see what it’d be like to build an ad hoc webapp that displays in the calendar, and didn’t want to make the user specify an exact times in un-natural language form.
~L