Thoughts on Scrybe – Latest Web 2.0ish Calendar(?) Tool

16 Jan 2007

I was just about to go to bed when I got an email from the folks at Scrybe inviting me into their beta (I suspect I applied awhile back and they’re just clearing through a backlog now).

The launch details are here. Their blog is also here.
I just logged in and played around with it for a few minutes. I don’t know very much about the product but it appears to be (another) online calendar and task tool (at least that’s what the initial phase looks like). The UI is flash-based and surprising easy to navigate. A double click here and a single click here and all of a sudden your jumping from the year perspective to the hourly perspective 😉

I’m evaluating it right now on a Windows XP box with Firefox 2.0 and it’s running fine. It also sports an offline mode which although I haven’t tried yet could potentially set it apart from some of the competition. It also has a nifty ability to print calendars/tasks in such a way that you can fold them up neatly and take them with you (hopefully this isn’t their idea of an offline mode 😉

I’m going to go to bed now so I’ll close with a general concern about these types of offerings. For all intents and purposes I’ve effectively sold my soul to Google. They own my email and desktop search. If I do track tasks and dates online I currently use Google’s tools. Moving forward, I’d seriously consider using Writely/Google’s word processor once they get some semblance of an offline version.

This isn’t to discount what Scrybe is doing and I haven’t read into them enough to say whether or not they’re competing directly with Google. I think there’s plenty of room for improvement (on the part of Google) with respect to user interface (amongst other things) but ultimately it comes down to data management. Google’s #1 far and beyond.

That being said, I’ll give Scrybe a shot over the next while to see how it performs. From the talk on their forums it looks like multi-person synchronization is in the cards which would be kind of interesting. If they could get it to sync (even just a push) with Google I’d be happy.

Time for bed. Snow storm in the morning.