Thursday, March 26, 2009

Review: Cozi.com

I have heard alot about cozi.com so I thought I might try it out (Finally.) I really am an outlook cheerleader, and I love my PDA Phone and sync my calendar and contacts with cozi. I use plaxo to sync contacts and such, and even for my calendar, but it was missing the "family" aspect of things.

It allows me to create user info for all family members, and enter in their cell phones and email addresses. This is cool. It also allows those family members to login and see the calendar, etc. The downside to this is that I have yet to meet a husband who takes enough responsibility to not need constant reminders to even CHECK to see if he has reminders, or to look at the calendar. Mine totally sucks at that, so I don't know that he will ever use it. Oh well.

Cozi seems to be a neat feature. it allows me to send emails and text message reminders to family members, and also lists like To-Do Lists and Shopping lists, right from within my internet browser. It's free (ad supported) and so far it seems.... okay. It also syncs with outlook.

The one thing that instantly sticks out to me, is the lack of customization available. I want to customize my homepage. I want to tell Cozi what lists and calendars and such that I want to see on my homepage. And it doens't do any of that. I can put lists in an order, and it will show the first list on the homepage as a default, but it also doesn't list the TITLE of the list, so if my to-do list is the first one on the list, then when Evan logs in, he will see MY to-do list and not his. That I find very frustrating and not very user friendly.

The calendar has some neat features, mostly all similar to outlook, but also allows you to choose who in your family is required to be at which events, and then you can notify those people accordingly via email or texts if you choose. It will also send reminders at a specific time and date if you choose. It also sets up reoccuring appointments but I haven't done that in cozi yet... although I use it frequently in outlook and on my pda phone. I think there is lots of room for improvement, but I am not sure how much improvement to expect in a free service. They mention that some of their features (family journal) are Beta, and that they are looking for feedback, but I have yet to see the place to provide feedback.

I will elaborate this review once I have been using it a while!

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