Best free collaboration tools
Free online whiteboard
Subscriber Philip McMahon writes "Gizmo, with Thinkature [1] you can create a collaborative workspace and invite co-workers, friends and colleagues to join you in just seconds. Once inside your workspace, you can communicate by chatting, drawing, creating cards and adding content from around the Internet. It's all synchronous, too - no need to hit reload or get an editing lock."
http://thinkature.com/about/
Free Web service arranges meetings automatically
Anyone who has tried to schedule a meeting at a time convenient to all the participants knows what a hassle this can be. TimeBridge is a free web service that does the work for you. All you do is type in the participant's email addresses and a set of possible times, and TimeBridge does all the rest. To make things even easier, it integrates with your Outlook Contacts and Calendar or, indeed, any iCal based calendar including Google. Registration is required. Thanks to subscriber Douglas Baumwall for the suggestion.
http://www.timebridge.com
The ultimate shared Web calendar?
Subscriber Jim Kelly writes "Any of your subscribers who are into social calendaring should check out 30boxes. If you and your buddies sign up, you can each set on an individual basis, what events on your calendars you share. It also features integration with Flickr, MySpace and other web sources." Nice find Jim; it's got a simple user interface, an expanding list of third party plug-ins and it's free. I do wish though, that it offered an integrated reminder system along the lines of BackPackIt [2]. Readers interested in web calendaring should also check out Plaxo [3].
[1] http://30boxes.com/
[2] http://backpackit.com/
[3] http://www.plaxo.com/