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Welcoming Sandy Users to PingMe

Posted: Nov 26, 2008 by Billy Gray Tagged pingme, buzz

We’ve noticed a bit of a spike in sign-ups to our interactive reminder service PingMe of late, and judging by the support e-mails we’re getting and some posts we’re seeing in the tubes, a lot of you folks are looking for a new service to replace the excellent I Want Sandy, which is closing its doors soon.

While we don’t provide the same feature set and syntax, PingMe does provide some similar features to Sandy, and a few extras that you might enjoy, so I figure a quick post here is in order to explain the basic functionality. More in-depth (if in need of update) documentation is available on the PingMe Help page. Our old Getting Started document may also be illustrative.

One of the things that makes PingMe really stand out among other reminder services is the flexibility it gives you for replying to a reminder to reschedule it for another time (built-in procrastination!), and its pestering feature, aside from the many avenues of interaction and some of the service integrations we’ve come up with. Hopefully we can touch on those things today.

Creating a reminder

Sandy has a great syntax for creating new reminders because you get to work with natural-sounding sentences. You can type things like:

  • Remind me to call my mother in 3 days
  • Remind me about yoga class on Friday at 8am

Pretty simple, “Remind me” to do something with the day/time information at the end of the message.

PingMe is a bit different. We don’t use natural language processing (yet!), but we do have a very simple syntax for creating reminders without having to go to the website. When you create a reminder (we call them pings) remotely (via E-mail, Twitter, or TXT message), you begin the message with the commands indicating when it should be sent, followed by the reminder message. The general syntax is:

[ date/time info ] This is my message [ flags ]

Here are some examples:

  • 10 min Call Mom 555-555-5555
  • 3hrs pick up the dry cleaning
  • h7pm drinks with the boys

Working with Twitter

Our syntax for creating reminders via Twitter is quite similar:

d gpm + [date/time info] This is my message [flags]

Note the d gpm + part! You send a direct message to our Twitter account. There are a few setup steps involved and some gotchas, so be sure to check out our documentation on creating pings via Twitter.

Date/Time syntax

Those were just simple examples, above. We use a chained syntax (described here) for doing more complex dates and times. Here are some examples:

1mo d12 h7p Sister's birthday party

This translates to “In one month, on the twelfth day, at 7pm”. You can be more verbose about it like so, as the matching is pretty good:

1 year month 3 day 15 Do them taxes buddy

Each number and time pair either set a specific date/time, or advance the time from now. When you use “1 year”, you are literally telling the parser next year, or 2009 (as of the time of this post). If you were to say “year 1” you would literally be saying “the year 1” and you’d get an error! If you don’t specify a year, you get the current one, unless that date has already passed; then the parser will assume you mean next year.

Here are some more examples to show you some easy and common ones:

h5p m30 get some gas
Today, at 5:30pm, get some gas. 
1day h11 client meeting for project x
Tomorrow, at 11am, client meeting for project x 
1wk take out the trash r:w
Now this one (one week from now, take out the trash) has something else, a flag on the end; r:w tells the parser to repeat this ping weekly.

Here are some of the repeat values you can specify:

  • d – Daily
  • w – Weekly
  • b – Bi-weekly
  • m – Monthly
  • y – Yearly
  • q – Quarterly
  • f – Mon-Fri

Let’s check out some of the other flags:

1wk take out the trash r:b p:10 t:m

This creates a ping that will go off one week from now, tell us to take out the trash, and it will repeat every two weeks (bi-weekly). It will also pester us every 10 minutes after it goes off until we respond, and it will be sent to our mobile targets. We’ll break this down in a bit, but first we need to go over responding.

Hit me back, yo! (or, Responding)

Sometimes you can’t take care of a task when the reminder goes off. You’re busy, best laid plans, &c., we all know how this works. So when that ping arrives in your e-mail or one your phone, or via Twitter, do you need to go to the website and reschedule it? Definitely not. All you need to do is reply with the new time you want it to go off. Simply write back the same as you would create a ping, sans the message:

15m

Or:

1day

Now that we’ve gotten that squared away, we can talk about nagging reminders.

Pestering

Sometimes you need to be told more than once to clean your room. Or sometimes you’re just busy and want to be reminded again later. PingMe has a feature called pestering where it will continue to send you the reminders at a specified interval until you respond. There are two ways to respond, or really three.

The first is to simply reschedule the task, which is pretty common and simple:

1wk

The second is to tell PingMe you’ve completed the task by writing back with ok, okay, or done. This will stop the pestering. If this is just a pestering ping, and not a repeating ping, this will mark it as done.

Repeating pings that pester are a different story altogether. Usually you want them to pester you on some schedule, say weekly. When the ping goes off you usually want to stop it pestering you when you’ve taken out the trash, but you still want it to remind you again next week. Or maybe you want to turn it off altogether.

  1. Respond with ok, okay, or done to stop the pestering, but keep the ping on it’s repeating schedule
  2. Respond with stop or off to mark the ping as done and turn it off

Targets

The last thing to discuss is targets. In PingMe, a target is a place where your pings get sent to. When you sign up, your e-mail account is automatically added as a target. If you entered a mobile number or a Twitter ID, those were also set up as targets. You can add, edit, and delete them as you like in the sidebar on the webapp.

Each target has a “Default” flag on them. When you create a ping the system assumes you want it to go to all of your default targets, unless you specify otherwise. To specify otherwise, you’d use the t: flag.

  • t:e Tells the parser to hit your e-mail targets
  • t:m Tells the parser to use your mobile targets
  • t:t Tells the parser to send the ping to your Twitter targets

Help!

You can always send the command “help” to PingMe and it will respond with some short examples of the syntax.

Using Twitter, Other Stuff

We’ve built a lot of great functionality into PingMe over the last couple of years, so you might wish to peruse our blog for more information and tricks. We do have a couple pieces of further reading for you to check out:

STRIP on the iPhone >> << Using PingMe with Dial2Do

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  • Wednesday, November 26, 2008

    Fox says:

    One thing that comes to mind is that you need a mobile app. Even if it is one that just uses labels for your protocol but it seems however everything is relative to day.

    Two, how can you take natural calendar input on the web but not be able to get that from an email or sms has me puzzled. It may be I just don't understand the complexity of it but I would assume you could scrape or grep that info as the formats for date & time are specific and natural aren't usually mistaken for other kinds of info.

  • Thursday, November 27, 2008

    Dan says:

    Can one forward messages to gopingme like one would for Sandy? My favorite Sandy use was reminding me to get back to emails with long fuses.

  • Thursday, November 27, 2008

    Billy says:

    <p>@Fox,</p>
    <p>We would love to put together a mobile app, and hope to do it soon. I'm not sure what you mean for web vs. e-mail/text input (the website uses a calendar while text input uses the command strings), but we certainly recognize that we need to make text input simpler the way Sandy did, so that the syntax is easier to remember and more natural. How are you liking PingMe otherwise? Feel free to e-mail us at support@zetetic.net.</p>
    <p>@Dan,</p>
    <p>We don't have that capability right now, but it's definitely something we'll investigate providing! That's a good idea.</p>

  • Thursday, November 27, 2008

    Fox says:

    @Billy - for the sake of clarification unless your web calendar translate to a form of 1d 2months etc. Isn't taking the info as it is entered into the calendar? And if so how can it understand that and not the input that comes by email or SMS? In other words your calendar is not a 2 days from now 2 months from now 3 hours from now calendar and yet is seems to understand it. I'll email you.

  • Friday, November 28, 2008

    Evelyn says:

    THANK YOU for PingMe! So far, it accomplishes what I used "I Want Sandy" for: simple on-the-fly reminders from my email, some of them repeating. The pester feature is a bonus I will be using. The syntax is taking some getting used to, but it will be fine.

    Now, what do we have to do to make sure you stay in business?

  • Friday, November 28, 2008

    Billy says:

    <p>@Fox - I think maybe the confusion here is that unlike Sandy, the web site itself only provides calendar/form entry (in Sandy the website you typed what you wanted just like in your e-mail) which gets converted directly into timestamps, whereas our text input syntax is for all other entry points beyond the website, like e-mail, twitter and has to go through a lexical parser to be converted into timestamps. </p>

    <p>@Evelyn - thanks very much, we're glad to hear this! I suppose the best thing you could do is to help us spread the word ;-)</p>

  • Saturday, November 29, 2008

    Frustrated Sandy User says:

    Glad to have found you. You guys seem like you could pick up where Sandy left off, and do it better. For a lexiconic method of parsing natural language times into date time stamps, take a look at this javascript code that makes life easier for javascript developers dealing with complex date problems:

    http://www.datejs.com/

    (it's licensed under the MIT license)

    Please consider adding a "personal" touch by having an assistant we can name and cc in emails, as this was the primary feature of IWantSandy.com's that made the service so useful. If you make the name of this assistant configurable, and set up email addresses so that they are assistantName@username.gopingme.com, you will have taking the service a step better than Sandy's. Additionally, simply have your parser look for the assistant's name in the email, and read in everything following that until a period or line break is met. Using the MIT script as a basis, you should be able to easily parse the natural language and have a IWantSandy site killer in no time. Looking forward to how this service progresses.

    Please, take a lesson from IWantSandy.com - If you're considering a career move, consider first how much money you could make simply charging $1 per month per user, and decide if a job somewhere else makes ANY sense at all.

    P.S. If you're looking for a coder for contract work, contact me :-)

  • Sunday, November 30, 2008

    Thylacine says:

    If you created a way to print out all your lists in a concise and organized fashion (all on one page depending on the length) you'd be perfect. I organized my sandy lists with tags by location/context and printed them out and carried them with me through the day.

    Do you know if that is in the plans?

    I really appreciate this letter explaining things.

  • Sunday, November 30, 2008

    Billy says:

    <p>@Frustrated: Thanks very much for the tip. We do expect to make several large improvements to PingMe over the next few months, some of them along the lines you're suggesting, but I can't really commit to anything right now, we haven't made any formal decisions. If you want to discuss contract work, feel free to reach out with your resume to support@zetetic.net, although I can't really promise anything there ;-)</p>

    <p>@Thylacine: We do intend to provide a list view (we're not crazy about the sticky notes display anymore), and a print view in the future, but I can't commit to any time frame right now.</p>

    <p>Thanks very much for getting in touch with us here, and providing all this feedback. Feel free to send more of it along to support@zetetic.net.</p>

  • Sunday, November 30, 2008

    Matt says:

    Is it possible to share reminders with other people (through cc for example) and have PingMe send them reminder Pings as well?

  • Monday, December 01, 2008

    Billy says:

    <p>@Matt - yes, you can share pings, you configure that in the web interface. We've got some info to get you started with that <a href="http://gopingme.com/help#ping_contacts">over here</a>.</p>

    <p><a href="http://gopingme.com/help#ping_contacts">http://gopingme.com/help#ping_contacts</a></p>

  • Friday, December 05, 2008

    Jill says:

    I'm going to try this out, as it's the closest I've seen to the usefulness of Sandy. The natural language would be lovely though - I don't really want to have to think about the syntax so much - I just want to set the reminder quickly and move on.

    One thing I missed about Sandy was the IM interface, once Twitter shut that down. I used IM to send direct messages to Sandy pretty frequently, and found myself using Sandy less once that capability was gone. Any chance that could be added in the future?

  • Friday, December 05, 2008

    physio says:

    One thing I really liked about Sandy was the ical for my reminders that I could subscribe to. If I set up a reminder for an appointment next Tuesday at 10am it would show up in my Google Calendar as it was subscribed to my Sandy ical.

    Any chance you will be offering such a feature in the near future?

  • Friday, December 05, 2008

    Billy says:

    <p>@Jill - glad to hear you're giving us a shot! We've got a lot of improvements on the way for PingMe, and syntax is one of the big ones. We've got an IM listener on our long term list of things to work in, but I can't commit to a timeframe just yet. Our priorities right now are syntax improvements and interface improvements, but I think we'll get to IM a few months out.</p>

    <p>@Physio - iCal feeds are part of our list of things to implement Really Soon Now. Like I said above, can't commit to a time frame right now, but it's coming!</p>

  • Sunday, December 21, 2008

    Tex says:

    Any chance of you setting up service w/JOTT. One of the best parts of sandy was being able to Jott Sandy.

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