Last night, Spanning Sync announced a new initiative to recruit new users. It is in the nature of a referral incentive program, and it’s called “Save 5 + Make 5.” The idea is simple enough: If I (as a paid Spanning Sync user) refer you (a new customer), then you get $5 off your purchase and I get $5.

It’s an interesting idea. I’m going to go ahead and throw a link up here for my referral code in case anybody is interested in signing up for Spanning Sync. You might as well save 5 bucks while you’re at it and make me 5 bucks as well, because despite the fact that I’m supposed to be a rich lawyer, there’s a good chance I’ll be paying back my student loans well into my 50′s.

What’s the reason for this? Spanning Sync says:

Why are you doing this?
Since we launched Spanning Sync in March 2007, we’ve never done any paid marketing: no ads, no conference sponsorships, no press releases, no laptop stickers, nada. Just a two-page website and a blog. But in spite of that, Spanning Sync has seen great success, due mostly to the fact that our customers recommend Spanning Sync to their friends and colleagues. So in addition to saying “thank you” we’ve decided to actively invest our customer community with “Save 5+Make 5″.

My guess is that, in light of the fact that Calgoo has gone free and Google is beginning support of CalDAV, they are feeling some pressure.

I might give Calgoo a try before I paid for Spanning Sync, since it’s free. I’ve never tried Calgoo, so I can’t vouch for it. I’m definitely a believer in Spanning Sync, and have been using it effortlessly and flawlessly for the last 8 months. Google’s free CalDAV support could be the killer gCal/iCal sync solution, but for now it’s way too buggy to depend upon for a law practice, IMHO.

Spanning Sync 2.0 (presently in beta) does offer Address Book/Google Contacts sync, though, which I don’t believe Calgoo offers. At present, however, I’m not sure how much better it is than Address Book’s built-in ability to sync with Google Contacts. The killer feature, for me anyway, will be the ability to sync specific groups of contacts from Address Book to specific groups of contacts in Google Contacts. Charlie Wood, from Spanning Sync, says they’re looking into that feature, but it’s not planned for the 2.0 release. No word on exactly when it will be coming. For me, that may well be enough to keep me on as a paid subscriber in 4 months when my subscription runs out.

Hit the banner above or in the sidebar, or: Click here to save $5 on Spanning Sync!

Well, today I read that Calgoo is changing its business model to be ad supported, meaning that, as of July 22, 2008, it is free. Calgoo will sync not only sync iCal and Google Calendar, but also a whole host of other calendars – Mac, PC and Linux.

In even more exciting news this afternoon, I read on Cnet’s Webware that Google Calendar now supports CalDAV. According to Cnet:

Mac users who use Google Calendar and iCal to manage their on and offline calendaring have had to use a myriad of third-party products to keep the two in sync. That’s changed now that Google is including CalDAV support as part of Google Calendar’s built-in functionality. This means you’ll be able to make changes in iCal and have them instantly reflected in iCal and vice-versa. Previously that data swap was a one-way affair, with users simply subscribing to their Google Calendar feeds in iCal.

CalDAV is a standardized sharing protocol, allowing you to access the same set of data with others to edit and sync data changes between multiple users. On a workflow level, this means people with access to edit your Google Calendar will be able to make changes in both iCal and Google Calendar that will sync up with both.

Cnet does warn, however, that the CalDAV for iCal is not officially supported by Google at this very moment, and that there is a long list of known issues. So, you may want to hold off just a bit while they work out the kinks.

I haven’t tried out Calgoo or Google Calendar’s CalDAV yet. Given that I still have until the beginning of 2009 before my paid Spanning Sync subscription runs out, I think I’ll stick with that until then. But, I am super excited to try out Google’s CalDAV solution.

Gratuitous, barely related, but funny, clip of the day: DAV’s not here, man (yet).