Yahoo seems to be trying too hard to reserve its position in mail marketing. Today yahoo announced the availability of an all-new Yahoo! Calendar, the No. 1 Web-based calendar service in the world. Ofcourse we saw this already in Gmail, but Yahoo coming with some unique features and alerts & reminders and etc…

The new Yahoo! Calendar, which will begin rolling out in beta to users today, offers an intuitive, online social calendaring experience that enables people to be more productive. Based on open standards, the new Yahoo! Calendar beta makes it easy for users to discover, share and keep track of events and appointments. Yahoo! Calendar is a popular feature within Yahoo! Mail, a key starting point for consumers on the Web and one of the most popular Web mail services in the world with more than 278 million users(2) per month.

Leveraging last year’s acquisition of Zimbra, a leader in open source messaging and collaboration software that brought Ajax functionality to online calendars, the new Yahoo! Calendar is built on the Zimbra platform using the iCalendar (iCal) and CalDAV(3) standards. The new calendar is interoperable with other online calendar services including those from Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft, AOL and Google, so users can share their calendar data with friends who use other online calendaring services and subscribe to any iCal-based public calendar.

Other new easy-to-use features allow consumers to keep track of activities through color-coding, drag and drop appointments for easy scheduling, and “zoom-in and -out” from a monthly “wall calendar” view to a single event — all from within a Yahoo! Mail account. In addition, Images from the Flickr photo community can be included to create a visual, unique-looking online calendar with interesting photos.

Key features in the new Yahoo! Calendar include:

1. Sharing: Layering functionality that makes sharing events and keeping track of group activities easier
2. Zoom: Calendar zoom capabilities make it easy to add and view new Calendar entries
3. Photos: Integration with Flickr adds an interesting visual component to the Calendar and gives it the feel of a classic wall calendar through interesting public, Creative Commons designated photos on Flickr
4. Alerts: Reminder feature makes it simple to set email, IM or SMS reminders for important Calendar activities
5. Drag and Drop: Web 2.0 drags and drop functionality makes it simple to move appointments to new times — all without refreshing the Web page
6. “To Do” List: A simple and handy “To List” feature makes it easy to keep track of important chores and tasks

Lets wait and see either Google or Yahoo first!

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