Thursday, November 15, 2007

I Want Sandy: The Reminder Service

I've been using the iwantsandy.com reminder service for a few days now and am really liking the features. The service allows you to create, tag and snooze reminders. In my oppinion, the best part is the ability to share reminders with your friends and family. To get started, create an account on the iwantsandy web site and confirm your email address. Then login to the site and read The Sandy Guide - a how to on the Sandy service. The Guide will get you info on more than 80% of the features.

Overview
The service has been good! I've used it to remind me about meetings, phone numbers, grocery list items, where i parked and peoples names. I also get a digest each morning that plans out my day for me!

Did I mention that Sandy works with SMS and Twitter!? Sandy will remind you by sending an SMS message to your mobile, but it will cost you regular text message rates. However, if you have a data plan and Twitter account, you can follow her and she'll automatically follow you. Unfortunately, the Twitter feature is not completely implemented... yet.

Details
The best part of the service, in my opinion, is the ability to add other people to the reminder. I can cc: multiple people and Sandy will include everyone in the reminder. The most fun was adding the additional email address and allowing my girlfriend to send me reminders. This one feature is helping us to keep a running list of tasks to finalize our move because we can both add tasks and receive the reminders.

The downside: its a bit slow. After sending my reminder, I waited a couple of minutes before it appeared in the web site home page. Additionally, I dont alway get reminded on time - sometimes a few minutes late. Its not a big deal if scheduling something off in the future but proved a bit problematic when I wanted to remind myself in 20 minutes.

Daydreaming...
I wonder what type of applications can be built on top of this? Obviously advertising, imagine you have a reminder to bring home dinner and see banner adverts for different dinner products: beef, chicken, sides!

Conculsion
Sandy is a cool service! I would love to use this service with Twitter and look forward to it exposing an API for me to code with... Enjoy.

Happy Thanksgiving.