SaaS

Google vs Yahoo calendar

I'm not a Google fanboy, but we all have to face it: folks at Google make splendid software and they sure hit a lot of sweet spots.

Yesterday however, I got stuck on a problem with Google calendar. As with desktop calendars you can subscribe to a feed. Adding a feed works as expected, but Google only refreshes feeds once a day or even less. This makes the feature worthless to me and my clients as our software uses its own calendar (and its own logic). Calendar updates also tend to happen multiple times a day.

Because of this I started looking for another vendor and after a while (there isn't much to look at when you're in the market for a free solution) I discovered that Yahoo is working on a new calendar (the old one is really worthless and the looks are ... well, you should try it). You can use the new beta calendar if you go through this form.

I don't really know how good the calendar works as I lack experience, but it sure handles feeds predictable and updates them often. You can also click a manual refresh button. See the screenshot to convince yourself:

yahoo calendar

I think the Yahoo calendar is definitely worth looking at. Bonus is that Blackberry phones can synchronize with Yahoo calendar. That is in fact why I was searching in the first place: trying to get our calendar feed onto a Blackberry.