It was big news on Friday when the popular online calendar 30 Boxes announced its partnership with my favorite wiki application, PBWiki. For those of you who haven’t been in your wiki for awhile, PBWiki has added a new point-and-click editor which allows you to quickly create and edit your wiki pages without knowing any code at all. As a part of this WYSIWYG editor, they have incorporated a new feature called “Insert Plugin”. Not the best name, I know, but this little button will enable you to add a handy AJAX calendar from 30 Boxes with a click of your mouse. Other goodies which can be added include any Google Gadget, YouTube Vids, Bubbleshare photo slideshows, and a chat room.

While I am thrilled with these upgrades to PBWiki, I was a bit disappointed that they didn’t choose to partner with Airset, which I believe to be the best free group calendar program on the Web. I have used 30 Boxes and enjoy their tagging and color-coding features, as well as their widgets for MySpace and start pages, but I have found that Airset provides more features for shared calendaring.

Airset was designed to be a shared calendar for groups. Its users can create and administer multiple groups for work, family, school, or for events such as reunions, as well as keep their own personal calendar. They can invite co-workers, family members, and other contacts to join these groups and are able to assign people roles with various permissions levels for creating, viewing, and sharing content. Each group shares a calendar as well as a contacts address book, a task list, group blog and links list.

Airset has now integrated Skype technology which enables group members to conduct conference calls with other members easily. Each group has multiple RSS feeds available to it for their calendars, blogs, task and links lists. Members can receive event reminders via mobile phone and can sync their Airset organizers with their Palm or Microsoft Outlook program. While it might not be as pleasing to the eye as some other online calendars and could sorely use a UI engineer, I find it to be the most useful.

Although PBWiki didn’t choose my favorite calendar to team up with, I am very excited to see Web 2.0 companies joining forces to offer even more stellar services. Just last month the incredible Zoho online office application partnered with the hosted storage service Omnidrive. While I personally prefer AOL’s Xdrive because of its 5GB storage capacity, the fact that I can now create and edit documents from within my Omnidrive account just might change my mind. But that’s another post…