Google Calendar (CL2) Launched

In February I posted about the Google Calendar and speculated that its arrival was fast approaching. Well…CL2 was launched tonight (the 12th of April). Create your calendar here. My initial opinions are as follows:

Its great. The interface is pretty darn snazzy…very Gmail-like with its layout; which is great to see as this just screams the at coming full integration between CL2 and Gmail. Everything is Ajax-ified as would be expected with any of Google Services and they do the whole event creation thing right. Its quick, its easy, and fairly intuitive while screwing with advanced event options. Whats really great are the options for repeating events; they have the standard weekly, monthly, bi-monthly, etc…but they also have very student friendly time slots: events that occur on Monday/Wednesday/Fridays, on Tuesday/Thursdays, and on every weekday.

Another huge win is the social aspect that is delivered at launch of CL2. You have the ability to add guests to events and calendars. Oh, and thats another thing! You can create multiple calendars and make them publicly viewable or make them private (you can restrict viewing to just yourself or open it up to certain people). A nice thing about the multiple calendar stuff is that you can view all your available calendars on a single calendar page where it combines events. Very cool stuff.

Other cool features are:

• Notifications for events can be sent via E-mail, popups, and by Cellphone!
• Discussion threads on events
• Event integration with Google Maps
• Ability to add other public calendars to your own…
• A number of country specific holiday calendars are available for adding into your list of calendars.
• Importing from csv and ical

I’m a happy camper.