The calendar is coming in the next few weeks and will feature improved navigation capability. Here’s what Yahoo has promised users with its release:

*Cleaner design with easy discovery and navigation
*Much faster interface
*New toolbar buttons to navigate between day, week, and month views
*Improved month view with full event titles and all the day events
*All the themes that you use with the latest version of Yahoo! Mail
*Holiday calendars from 15 new countries
*And a lot more…

Exciting news! A new calendar on the horizon….I can’t wait!

Interoperability is the name of at least one game here.  Open standards were employed, and the ability to share things with friends – whether they use offerings from AOL, Apple, Google, Microsoft, or Mozilla – came about as a result.  Users will also be able to "[s]ubscribe to any iCalendar-based public calendar and add upcoming events and show times to your Yahoo! Calendar."  (Think "the next new episode of ‘Lost.’")

Drag and drop options have been introduced, as have email, IM, and SMS reminders, according to a post on Yodel Anecdotal.  Then, on the aesthetic front, users will be able to pull in photos from Flickr.

 

But here’s what’s key, and perhaps the reason that Yahoo bothered to issue both a blog post and a press release about its little calendar: "Imagine being able to download your favorite sports team’s schedule, your class schedule, or your child’s t-ball schedule and being constantly on top of everything.  That’s coming soon, along with additional event discovery features, including integration with Upcoming.org and other Yahoo! properties.  And soon your Yahoo! Calendar will even auto-synch with Outlook and your iPhone."

All of this goes a bit beyond the utility of paper.  Admittedly, since we have yet to test these features and the tool still doesn’t sound like a revenue-earner, Yahoo Calendar’s importance shouldn’t be overstated, but pulling everything off would probably put Yahoo’s name in a positive spotlight again.