Posted: Aug 29, 2007
by Billy Gray
Tagged pingme
Many PingMe users are really excited to be using Jott with PingMe. But it seems a few users that have recently joined the service are getting stuck on how to correctly specify when the Ping should be sent.
Human beings tend to be a lot better at learning how to write than computers are at learning to read. Therefore, when we were first designing a short-hand for creating Pings remotely we had two priorities for the “time” language:
- Make it very quick and terse so that users would have to do as little typing as possible from their mobile phone
- Make it easy for PingMe’s computers to reliably parse
PingMe’s time codes do exactly that – they allow you to specify the minimum amount of information necessary to convey a date and time. ‘h12 m30 call mom t:m’ is a lot less typing, than say, ‘remind me to call mom at twelve thirty on my cell phone’, and it’s 100 times easier for our computers to process.
When we introduced the ability to create Pings by speaking via the Jott service (with which are totally unaffiliated), we found that the time codes fit well there too. Numbers and and interval codes (days, weeks, hours, minutes) were reliably transcribed by the system in our testing with a very low failure rate. Our primary concern is always reliability, so we didn’t focus as much on a natural language translation: you basically speak the exact same time codes that you would type into an email or SMS interface to PingMe.
Sure, it would be really great to be able to say “remind me to call mom at twelve thirty on my cell phone,” or something similar. That will take more work on our part, and we need to evaluate how critical a feature that is for our users. To put it in perspective, we’ve processed thousands of time-coded messages, and many users are already comfortable with this interface.
In the meantime, lets review how to specify a Ping remotely and go over what you need to say to get the job done when you create a Ping by voice using Jott (or via SMS for that matter).
Messages to create a Ping must begin with some information telling PingMe when to send the reminder. The time codes we use for this information are documented in our help here, but here’s a basic example:
h12 m30 Call mom
The full set of intervals and their synonyms follows:
'min' => [ 'm', 'min', 'mins', 'minute', 'minutes' ],
'hour' => [ 'h', 'hr', 'hrs', 'hour', 'hours' ],
'day' => [ 'd', 'ds', 'day', 'days' ],
'week' => [ 'w', 'ws', 'wk', 'wks', 'week', 'weeks' ],
'month' => [ 'mo', 'mos', 'mon', 'mons', 'month', 'months' ],
'year' => [ 'y', 'yr', 'yrs', 'year', 'years' ]
When PingMe receives a message, it evaluates it left to right. It sees the h12pm and sets the ping to go off at 12pm today. Note that if 12pm today has already passed, this Ping will not be sent! Then PingMe sees the ‘m30’ and updates the Ping to be sent at 12:30pm. Another form of time code is to specify a number and then the interval name, like this:
1mon 1d h6p Call mom
In this case PingMe sees the ‘1mon’ and recognizes it to mean ‘1 month from now.’ Then ‘1d’ pushes the time ahead one more day. Notice that we’ve switched back to the other format to set the time to 6pm! PingMe long-hand for this message would be:
1 month 1 day hour 6pm Call mom
So this statement means ‘call mom in one month and one day at six o’clock PM’ The example is perhaps a little contrived but gives you an idea of how flexible the time codes are.
Also notice that you can abbreviate the interval names, but you don’t have to. When speaking into Jott you should use their full names, which seems to help ensure accuracy, like this:
one month day fourteen call mom
If you have feedback on the time codes or Jott interfaces please let us know.
Posted: Aug 28, 2007
by Billy Gray
Tagged pingme
Last night we saw a really big surge in Japanese users on PingMe. Irashaimasen! We wondered what was up and saw that this article on a Japanese website might have been the cause.
We were really curious to find out what the article says so we popped it into Google Translate, but their Japanese support is still a little wonky. Can anyone help us out? Is it a decent review?
Posted: Aug 27, 2007
by Stephen Lombardo
Tagged pingme
We’ve been hard at work on PingMe over
the past few weeks. Here are a few improvements to the way you can create Pings remotely from your mobile devices.
Create Pings with Email Subject
Hardcore Blackberry and Email wizards everywhere often type quick notes directly in the subject line of a message. It saves keystrokes and lets you easily find messages by subject in your message list view. Now you can use this messaging style to create Pings by placing the entire create message in the subject and leaving the body part empty.
New Flags for Remote Pings
We’ve added some new flags that let you specify confirmation mode and set tags when creating a Ping by e-mail or from your Phone:
- Specifying c:y or c:yes after your message will require confirmation on a Ping
- Tag your mobile Pings using the z: flag, followed by a list of tags, separated by spaces, commas, or both
Here’s an example that would create a tagged ping that requires confirmation:
1d h5p Call Dunder-Miflin, close paper deal c:y z: followup calls sales
Posted: Aug 27, 2007
by Billy Gray
Tagged pingme
Timezones are a difficult thing, whether you’re traveling or communicating across them. While the jet-lag will always catch up with you, PingMe won’t let you down when you’re crossing timezones and borders.
In the Profile screen you can select your Timezone from a drop-down list. It provides many different timezones to account for the small adjustments to time that are made by various local governments around the world.
Let’s suppose that you are traveling from the East coast of the United States to the West coast. Changing your Timezone to ‘US – Pacific’ will change the display time of your current pings by three hours. They will still be sent at the same time, which is to say that a Ping set for 5pm Eastern time will be sent at 2pm Pacific time. This is great if you don’t want to miss that conference call with your boss at 1pm Eastern time.
But what if you’re not just making a short stay, what if you’re moving? Or maybe you have daily Pings (like “wake up,” which seems to be very popular) that you want to go off at the same time of day in the new time zone? We’ve got you covered.
When you select a new Timezone on the profile screen, a check box appears labeled “Move all pings to this timezone?” If you select this option and save your profile, you’ll find a Ping that was scheduled to be sent at 5pm Eastern time will now be sent at 5pm Pacific time.
Posted: Aug 20, 2007
by Stephen Lombardo
Tagged pingme
How would you like to be able to “call in” a PingMe reminder over the phone?
Mike, a PingMe user, writes on his MyTechTalk blog
I think the folks at Jott and the folks at PingMe should join forces to create a stellar service. Jott’s voice to email technology could be modified by PingMe to quickly create reminders when I’m driving in my car and not in front of my computer.
Basically, Jott is a really useful mobile transcription service offering “mobile note taking and hands-free messaging”. Sign up and you can call their 800 number and speak a message that will be converted to written text and sent out by email. PingMe is a mobile service that sends out scheduled reminders to your cell phone and email on a defined schedule. Together, they are unstoppable.
We agreed it would be amazingly useful to phone in Pings while driving or just to save our fingers from typing an SMS message. Thus, we spent a little time coding up the back-end, and the PingMe / Jott mashup was born!
Start by going to http://www.jott.com to sign up. Do it now, don’t wait, because their service rocks. Follow the instructions on their site to activate your account. Then go into the contacts tab and add your PingMe address. (you can find your PingMe address in the welcome email we sent you, or on your profile page in PingMe).
We suggest you call the contact “GoPingMe”, so it’s sufficiently different than the default “Me” moniker that Jott uses for “note to self” type messages.
Then comes the fun part. Add Jott’s toll free number to your speed dial. Call up the Jott number. They say..
Who’d you want to Jott?
You say…
GoPingMe
They say…
BEEP
You speak…
Two days, hour eight, call and wish mom a happy birthday
Wait a few minutes, and voila, you’ve got a brand new Ping that will be sent to your mobile phone and email targets in two days at eight o’clock AM.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Before trying to create a Ping using Jott you should check out our help entry on mobile creation that describes the way PingMe time codes work. It explains why you’d say “2 days, hour eight” instead of “09/01/07 at 8:00am”. You should also read our recent post on Using time codes to create Pings for even more details.
Let us know what you think!
Posted: Aug 17, 2007
by Stephen Lombardo
Tagged pingme, buzz
It’s been really incredible to watch the response to PingMe over the past week. This is just a short-list of sites that have reviewed or mentioned PingMe recently:
PingMe even had a stint on del.icio.us/popular. Our user community is growing fast – join us now and get things off your mind.
Posted: Aug 17, 2007
by Stephen Lombardo
Tagged pingme
PingMe experienced a service interruption starting shortly after 5pm EDT on the 16th that interfered with the delivery of outbound pings. The issue affected approximately 60 people whose messages were either delayed or not delivered.
I’d like to report that we were able to identify and resolve the problem and that we have taken steps to protect against this happening again. We’ve also added multiple monitors as an added precaution.
We know that you rely on PingMe for timely and accurate reminders so we take this type of problem very seriously and sincerely apologize for any inconvenience. If you are one of the people affected we will let you know directly, but anyone can feel free to contact us (support at gopingme dot com) with questions or concerns.
Update 08/18/07 – Here is some additional information on the useful new monitors that we’ve added…
- A proactive monitor that alerts us of any ping waiting for delivery for more than a few minutes
- A reactive monitor that alerts us to any ping who’s delivery was delayed by more than a few minutes
- A primary monitor that continuously checks dispatch and receipt services to ensure availability and actively restart if there are problems
- A secondary monitor that alerts support if the dispatch service becomes unavailable
- A monitor that checks the availability of our web and mail services from multiple remote networks
- Daily reporting of delivery time statistics and error reports
PingMe has been live for almost 6 months and this is the first outage of its kind. We’re taking it seriously and working hard to make PingMe the most reliable service possible.
Posted: Aug 13, 2007
by Stephen Lombardo
Tagged pingme
Our goal with PingMe is to help you answer one question: What should you be doing? So we’ve been hard at work on PingMe over the past few months adding frequently requested features and making it even easier to use. We’ve made so many improvements that we wanted to roll them up and let you know about them in one spot.
You can check out the site over here
Contacts
PingMe’s gone social! You can now share Pings with your significant other, friends, or co-workers. Just log into PingMe and hit the Contacts tab to link up with your close friends and family.
Once you are joined up with other PingMe users you can add them to your Pings to coordinate reminders for events or tasks with other people. Shared Pings are just like personal pings except that they show up on everyones Ping list and can be sent to other people’s targets.
Learn more about sharing Pings
-or-
Add contacts to your account (requires login)
Tagging
Some of our frequent PingMe users suggested that it would be great have a way to keep Pings organized and categorized. Now you can – each time you create or update a Ping you can Tag it. Your tags show up on your PingMe screen and clicking on a tag name will filter to only show Pings in that category. People are already using this to organize reminders for birthdays, phone calls, bills, personal events, etc. You can even use Tags to create contextual next action lists, ala Getting Things Done.
Mobile Creation
PingMe has always let you reply to Pings from the system to reschedule them. Now you can also create new pings directly from your mobile while you are away from your computer.
Each PingMe account has a unique “PingMe Address” (you can find this address in your profile screen or in the confirmation email sent by PingMe when you create an account). Lets say your PingMe address is shoes45rockets@gopingme.com. Just add that address to your email or cell phone address book and you can create a new Ping by sending it a message. The general format is
[Time code] [your pingme message] [options]
So send a message like this…
1 day Poker game tonight - don't forget the chips and your bankroll
…and a new ping will be scheduled for tomorrow.
Learn more about creating Pings on the Go
Confirmations
PingMe was originally intended as a simple reminder service. Set up a reminder with a day and time and PingMe drops you a note so you don’t forget whatever needs to be done. If it’s not a good time reply back and reschedule it on-the-fly. Once we send the reminder, we’re done with it unless you reactivate the Ping.
Yet, some enterprising users have started to use PingMe as a more traditional to do list (something about the the sticky pad look and feel make people feel right at home storing general tasks). So we’ve added a new option to Pings when they are created called “require confirmation”. When you mark a Ping to “require confirmation” it will remain on your PingMe home screen until you actually mark it as Done or reply to a mobile ping with the word done or stop. This lets you track on items other than time sensitive reminders.
Learn more about creating Task Pings
New Time Codes
Time codes are a core part of PingMe’s mobile feature. While they may seem daunting at first, our time codes let you quickly interact with PingMe from moblile devices, even if they have limited keypads.
In the past all PingMe time codes were relative. So “1 day” in actual time would mean tomorrow at the same time. Now we’ve added whole new set of mobile time codes that let you specify exact times. The format for these new time codes is reversed, so you might say “day 20” if you wanted to move a ping to the 20th day of the current month, or “hour 10pm” if you wanted to reschedule a ping for 10 pm tonight.
Best of all these time codes can now be chained together, so you could easily say “2 days hour 9am” to mean “two days from now at 9 o’clock AM”. Or, in PingMe shorthand just key “2d h9a” into your mobile phone – much easier.
Check our help page for more detailed information about time codes.
Fresh Look
If you haven’t logged into PingMe for a while you’re in for a treat. The old interface was a little bit “blah”, so we’ve gave the site an overhaul. We hope you’ll find the new look is quicker to navigate and easier on the eyes.
Don’t worry though, we kept the sticky pad interface…
Come see for yourself
Digging Out of the Spam Trap
Unfortunately it looks like our server was “located” on the internet near a bunch of other systems that were sending spam. Their bad spam karma spilled over onto us and some popular email services, namely Gmail, started marking Pings as spam.
So, we picked up and moved over to a new hosting provider on a fast new server with lots of bandwidth. Now that the new server is up and running the spam problems seem to have abated. We also hope this improves overall reliability and speed of the service.
Request For Comments
We want to hear how you’re using PingMe! Send us an email or, preferably, a link to your blog entry, about how you use PingMe, what you like, and even what you don’t. If we reproduce your story (with your permission, of course) or link to it from our website in the next month we’ll send you a slick PingMe T-Shirt.
