image I can’t tell you how long I’ve been wishing and looking for something like this — a calendar application to manage a family’s calendar.

In my family, we just use a single Outlook calendar to manage everyone’s calendar.  This way, I can look at my PDA and easily see where everyone is.  Of course, my kids are 2 and 4, so this method works right now because I can easily distinguish between my entries and my wife’s entries.  OF course, sometimes it gets more complicated, and we end up putting appointment titles in like "John and kids – Home Depot Workshop."  I can only imagine how crazy this is going to get in a few years, once my kids are a bit older and have their own social activities.

So the concept behind Cozi is that you can have a master calendar that then color codes who’s involved in each activity.  So you can indicate that everyone is going to dinner out, but only dad and son are going for haircuts afterward.  Clever.

Cozi also adds a bunch of other interesting things like shopping lists, reminders, etc.  And the neatest feature is that they have an Outlook plug-in that synchronizes your Outlook-based calendar with their web service.  Clever.

So I haven’t actually tried it out, but it sure looks promising.  Maybe if I have time over the weekend…

My biggest fear as always, however, is trusting a "free" web 2.0 service.  Where’s the profit model?  I would actually feel better if they had a monthly fee.  Is this company going to just shut down someday, taking with it my precious calendar?  Perhaps I am just paranoid.  :-)