Remindo
A week ago, I thought of twitter as an interesting but ultimately pointless social diversion, like so many others. Then I started to use it, and realized that it is actually quite compelling.
Twitter provides not only a novel communication paradigm (it is different from blogging, IM, and chat), but also a platform on which to build simple but potentially useful applications.
Remindo is such an application. It is a reminder bot; simply tell it when you want to be reminded of something, and remindo will comply. For example, direct message remindo something like “tomorrow 10am make doctor appointment”. Tomorrow at 10am you will get a direct message back, telling you to make a doctor appointment.
Try it out! There is only one prerequisite - you must follow remindo before creating your first reminder.
Here are some examples of dates that remindo will understand:
- tomorrow 10am
- friday 3pm
- next monday
- april 10 5pm
- tonight at 10
Like most things, remindo isn’t perfect. Right now it’s definitely alpha software. Most of the issues lie in interpreting dates. However, at the very least, remindo will always send you a reply if it cannot understand what you asked it to do.
At time of writing, I have the following list of known problems:
- remindo doesn’t handle time zones (yet); all times are interpreted in the America/New_York timezone
- if the three letters “est” appear anywhere in your message, remindo will fail (so, words like “west”, “test”, and “rest” are problematic)
- if the word “in” or the word “from” appears anywhere in your message, remindo will get the date wrong (note that this is in my opinion the biggest problem, since remindo can’t tell that it messed up - it just reminds you at the wrong time)
Hopefully I’ll be able to fix these in the near future. If you notice any other issues, please post to the comments, or twitter me (@taylorbarstow)
