For the last year or so, I’ve been subscribed to a free service called I Want Sandy. Sandy is like a virtual calendar assistant, in that it allocates me a personal email address, which I can send a specially formatted email to. That email could be something like “remind me to pick up my dry cleaning next Wednesday at 6:45pm”, in the subject line or body of the email. At that time, I get an email back from Sandy with a reminder about my dry cleaning. I certainly am not a power user, using it maybe once or twice a week, but enough to make it convenient for those occasional reminders.
Well, I just got a notice from them that they are shutting their virtual doors on Dec 19. Looks like Twitter has bought their technology, and their CEO is also joining Twitter. Now, on to look for alternatives:
http://twitter.com/timer – Pros: backed by Twitter’s solid foundation Cons: Limited by Twitter’s access methods – text or browser, no email
http://gopingme.com/ – Pros: They seem to be ready for Sandy’s abandoned users, as they have a tutorial for ex-Sandy users on their home page. Just like Sandy, you can postpone event reminders (reply to reminder email with “remind me about this in 1 day”) type of thing.
http://www.rememberthemilk.com – Pros: Has email-task and receive-email-reminder functionality, but they seems to be 2 distinct operations. Cons: seems to be a full fledged task management system, which I already use Omnifocus for. I really need something just to replace Sandy with- a simple email/get-reminder-later system.
Looks like I will try http://gopingme.com, even with the cheesy service name.
