If all goes well, we plan to launch a beta on February 5. This will be an old school beta meaning the product will perform and look mostly primetime but we hope to get your feedback and will be adding some important features as we go.

What can you expect? I have written some stuff here and there. As I have mentioned, we are trying to create an application that you want to look at and work with every day. It is easy to add events (we have a very slick natural language parser that even your Mom will like) and it is easy to build up a small social network with whom you can share all or parts of your life.

When you think about it, a calendar is very much like a simple blog or journal and we anticipate that people (and application developers) will catch on to this potential. Ready to put your running log online? How about vacation notes that you can revisit down the road?

30B is also a handy way to passively communicate by letting people know where you’ll be or where you’ve been as well as a DLA (digital lifestyle aggregator) gluing together all the pieces of your online presence (e.g. photos, blogs, myspace, and the like).

There are only a handful of people using it right now and so far so good. It takes a long time to build a product and we hope that our beta testers will enjoy contributing to something new and fun!

I found this amusing. My Yahoo! Mail account put a Yahoo! Events email into bulk mail. Doh!

I am happy that our demo was able win praise from Om. We have done some other well-received previews as well.

But, in general, hype makes me nervous. Having spent many years building a large web business, it is long way from having a good idea to having a consumer web app. Mike Arrington recently put together a nice article that hints at potential beta pitfalls. Don’t get me wrong, we are trying to generate a little buzz, but we are also interested in product feedback especially from people like Om who see a lot of products and businesses. The funny dynamic that emerges is the more the hype the less you want to put something out there that is not quite feature complete.

Right now we are getting 30 Boxes onto a dedicated machine and finishing a couple of important features. We have created a nice and open architecture for skinning the design and want to have a couple more (in addition to the “Tiger OS X” that Om posted).

We are getting lots of people signing up to beta test. We are grateful for that and will make sure that you are the first ones to have at it. Our 30B blog will open up soon but before that is out there, I have a few additional comments.

This product is not for the hard core Outlook user! We taking the path of least resistance and then building upon that.

FAQ item: what’s up with the numbers and names? First of all, it is very difficult to find domain names, so our parent corporation 83degrees was something fun relating to a back-burnered project related to weather. The nomenclature was inspired by the folks at 37signals who are kicking butt. We use backpack to manage our working lists and will make them public upon launch.

For the product name, we really didn’t like any combinations with the word calendar and we didn’t want to make up a word or borrow one from a foreign language. Instead we went for something descriptive. In this case, while 30 is about a month, it actually describes the primary UI which is comprised of 30 “boxes.” We find it to be short, emotive, and easy to read.

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