Yay for Google! They’ve got another winner. I’ve been playing with GCal all morning and I’m pretty impressed. There’s still some room for improvement, of course, but Google has fixed one of my main peeves with 30Boxes: setting up repeating events and altering a single instance or the entire series is easy!

What I like:

• Creating calendars for different aspects of your life is easy
• Setting permissions on those calendars (and events) at different levels is fairly easy
• Typing in some keywords in the title when creating an event automatically populates some fields (similar to 30Boxes) such as when I type in “Weekend trip with friends in Sedona”, Sedona gets placed in the Location field for me. That’s nice.
• You have an Agenda view of your dates which is like a list of all most recent upcoming events on your calendars. This alternate view is nice and very useful for forecasting availability over more than one month or viewing annual events (like on your Birthdays calendar).
• Showing and hiding the different calendars is just a matter of a click, and this comes in handy especially for the Agenda view.
• Being able to share calendars with select people and give them rights to manage the calendar entries as well is a wonderful feature
• Duplicating events between calendars is just two clicks
• There is a URL based API you can use on your blog/website to create events with one click, so that you can publish an event that other people can instantly add to their own calendars.
• You can set up reminders to be sent in advance of events, selecting time periods from 10 minutes to 1 week, and the reminders can be sent as email, SMS to your mobile phone or as a popup window (assuming you have GCal open on your desktop).

What needs improvement:

• There’s no html view of your public calendars (to non Google users).
• Finding other people’s public calendars is not easy or intuitive… I still haven’t figured out how to do it without having the url for the calendar’s RSS feed
• There’s no integration with GMail even though the help says there is… this may be a timing issue as they roll updates out to the various Google servers
• There’s no integration with the Contacts in GMail… most of my events revolve around people I know so I would like to see those connections between my contacts and events
• There needs to be a way to add TODO list type functionality to this. So the tasks can show up on your Agenda, but not necessarily be bound to a hard completion date
• There needs to be a way to “share” an event between two calendars instead of just “duplicating” it, so that if you change the event it gets updated on all the calendars that reference it
• There should be a programmatic API for adding calendar entries to public calendars or calendars that are shared with you. For instance, to allow people to come to your blog and propose a date for a meeting or other event and have it posted to your public calendar for your site. Basically the opposite of the way the published event button works now.
• There should be a way to set up more than one reminder for an event, such as for a birthday, to get a reminder at 2 weeks from the day and another at a week, just to make sure that you actually get a present in time!
• You should also be able to set up the delivery type for each reminder. Currently you set that at a global level, but I’d rather set it so that each reminder might be delivered differently (mainly split by the period of time…).

What’s ripe for 3rd parties:

(put on your developer hat!)

• An HTML view of your public calendars. Someone out there will build this soon, I’m sure.
• Wordpress/TypePad/Blogger widgets to incorporate your calendar
• A manager to sync your events to and from GCal other services like Eventful, Trumba, and even 30Boxes.
• An Outlook add-in that automatically (or easily) publishes your events to GCal

Overall, it’s a great start and it’s going to be a lot of competition for some of the other options out there. Even with the issues I mentioned, I’m still pretty excited about what I’ve seen so far. I can’t wait to see what they do with it next.