Saying Goodbye to PingMe
We have some sad news to deliver to users of the PingMe reminder service. Starting today, we will be blocking new registrations on PingMe, and we have decided to turn off the system permanently starting on April 23rd.
So long, and thanks for all the fish
We believe in working on projects that are sustainable. When we built PingMe, we had very high hopes for it. It was designed from the ground up as a system that was more dynamic and flexible than anything else out there.
We have maintained PingMe for free for as long as possible for all the people that have been depending on it. We love to get email from people who have found the service to be an enormous help in their lives, and it’s partly a sense of responsibility to them that has helped us to keep it up.
Unfortunately, it’s just not a sustainable service in the long-term for several reasons:
- PingMe requires continuous maintenance and constant vigilance against abuse by spammers, malicious users, and even inadvertent mistakes. Recently, direct and accidental system abuse cases have been on the rise, to the point that we have almost daily incidents to deal with.
- PingMe is a difficult system to support, because of various problems with external SMS gateway providers, cellphone carriers, and email systems. These issues are mostly out of our control, and make it difficult or impossible to troubleshoot and resolve even common problems.
- Despite the fact that PingMe is widely used and well liked, it hasn’t grown to the point where we can monetize it or effectively compete with other systems.
- We’re a small team, and maintaining PingMe has become an undue burden on other projects that we have brought to market
Switching to Another System
There are plenty of other reminder systems and task managers out there. Each has their own way of doing things. While we can’t recommend any particular system, we encourage you to try out a few and see what else you like.
In order to help you get your data out of PingMe, we’ve added an export feature so you download an Excel/CSV or XML-formatted export of your reminders. We’ve also posted a reference guide to the export data here on our blog.
What does this mean for Zetetic and your other products?
PingMe is the only system we are shutting down. Tempo Time Tracking, Strip Password Manager, Codebook Secure Notepad, etc, will be completely unaffected. We are doing very well as a company, continuing to grow, and approaching our 6th year in business. In fact, the most important reason we are turning off PingMe is so that we can continue to give proper focus to our other products and services.
Thank you
Finally, we want to say thanks to all of our PingMe users for trying the service, providing feedback along the way, and helping to spread the word. We really appreciate it and sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
jw says:
What a bummer, but your reasoning makes sense. Good luck with the other products. Ping me will be missed.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
lb says:
Too bad you couldn’t consolidate with a similar service.
It appears you going to be an iPhone products company. I have Blackberry, so good-bye and good luck.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Ian says:
Just don’t ever shut down Tempo. You’d make a grown man cry if you did.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Mark Durst says:
Any late PingMe users have recommendations for another service?
Thursday, March 18, 2010
cosmicrepairdude says:
This is really upsetting. I depend on PingMe. Other than the late IWantSandy, the only other service I’ve tried is RemembertheMilk, which I found to be unreliable garbage. Can anyone recommend something simple that works? Thanks
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Shellie says:
I will miss PingMe…it has been a godsend for reminding me daily of my affirmations and as a bill reminder.
I understand why it must go, but I will miss my daily text reminding that I start the day with joy, happiness, love and laughter.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Maxwell says:
I’m with cosmicrepairdude – from IWantSandy to PingMe to … what? This will be a big hole in my life to fill.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Billy Gray says:
@jw – Thanks.
@Ib – Thanks. It’s such a complex system that any attempt to hand it off to someone else would be a really punishing project.
Just a quick note — the bulk of our business is in Identity Management consulting, and Tempo, our time-tracking service. Strip is being developed as a platform, we don’t intend to be primarily an iPhone app shop.
@Ian – Tempo isn’t going anywhere, it’s under active development ;-)
@cosmicrepairdude – I understand. For what it’s worth, if you search for “sandy replacements,” you’ll find a lot of suggestions for various reminder services and even side-by-side feature comparisons.
@Shellie – We’re really happy to hear that you got so much out of the service. Thanks.
@Maxwell – I remember coming across a service quite similar to ours a couple of months back that was quite polished and feature rich, but I can’t for the life of me remember now what it was called. Anybody?
Thursday, March 18, 2010
willemijns says:
http://www1.willemijns.com/reminden.htm list his (old) competitors,
it was a very good service ! good luck guys !
Thursday, March 18, 2010
kew says:
I’m really disappointed with this news too. I’ve come to depend on PingMe for so many things. :(
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Oss says:
Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
Bad news? Terribly bad news!
:( :((((((((((((
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Mary says: Just wanted to tell you Im a big fan - and thanks for all the reminders!!
Thursday, March 18, 2010
abourne says:
Pingme never designed an iPhone / iPod Touch / Android App.
Zetetic should have done this long ago in order to have grown to the point where it could be monetized and effectively compete with other systems.
Failed to do so despite repeated requests.
Thousands (perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands) of downloads would likely have occured with endless possibilities from there.
PingFail!
Thursday, March 18, 2010
jrk says:
Has anyone tried task.fm? It looks promising.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Billy Gray says:
@willemijns Thanks, and thanks for that listing.
@jrk Nice catch! That’s the one I was trying to remember in my earlier comment. I just gave it a quick test and it seems to work, although I can’t vouch for their uptime/reliability etc. Reminds me quite a bit of IWSandy.
@abourne I understand the frustration evident in your observation, but I don’t think you quite grasp all that’s involved in running this service, and in bringing a mobile application to market (to say nothing of then making a profit).
@Mary Thanks ;-)
@Oss, @kew, we’re sorry guys, but it’s the right thing for us to do.
Thanks for all the feedback, we’re listening.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Maxwell says:
One of the things I appreciated about PingMe was that the reminder appeared in the subject line of the message. task.fm also does this, which makes it a good candidate. Some others I am looking at are:
LetterMeLater
Remember the Milk
MemoToMe
reQall
I don’t think any of them have quite as crisp an interface as PingMe, unfortunately. reQall has an iPhone app, and does voice transcription, which is intriguing (if you have an iPhone). LetterMeLater allows for the longest messages. After Sandy and PingMe, I am also trying to gauge which ones are likely to be around for the next few years!
Thursday, March 18, 2010
ap_ says:
Very, very sad. Good bye.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
pete says:
Just checked out Google Calendar and it’ll work nicely for sending me reminders.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Anthony Feint says:
Billy Its sad to see pingme discontinue – I do understand how difficult these things can be.
Of course, at Task.fm, we would love to welcome existing PingMe users to our app and if anyone needs help using the system, you can get in touch with me directly at anthony@feint.me
If you would like to try out the Pro features, just get in touch and I’ll hook all pingme users up with a free Task.fm Pro account.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Maxwell says:
Anthony – I am leaning toward task.fm. Can you give more details about the free Pro account offer? Thx.
Friday, March 19, 2010
Anthony Feint says:
Maxwell, just register a free account - if you think Task.fm is something you'd like to keep using, just email me (anthonyfeint.me) and I’ll upgrade your account to pro for a couple of months.The pro account simply gives you access to Voice Call reminders and unlimited sms reminders.
Friday, March 19, 2010
Maxwell says:
Anthony – Thanks – I get it. Actually – sorry – the free account would probably work just fine for me. I don’t really use SMS (at least, not compared to my daughter!) and voice reminders would just annoy me. I like being able to choose when to work through my reminders, via email.
Friday, March 19, 2010
jacob says:
So sad to see pingme go! I have been looking at some of the other options and what I have yet to find is a service that offers the “pester” feature or something comparable. This was the one feature that is most important to me.
Does anyone know of a service with a similar feature?
And a question to the makers of pingme … any chance of releasing an open source version that those of us with web servers could run for our own personal use?
Friday, March 19, 2010
behindEyes says:
What a very sad news!
I never even want to imagine it.
Because pingme is so capable butler for me.
Thank you for your help thus far.
Friday, March 19, 2010
Dave says:
Sorry to see you go. Thanks for the thousands of reminders. Good luck.
Friday, March 19, 2010
Carlos says:
Hi,
I haven’t used it for some time, but it was nice and I appreciate you released it for free. Thanks and good luck!
Friday, March 19, 2010
Billy Gray says:
Jacob wrote:
For the time being we decided against doing that, but we’ll give it some further thought. Our main trepidation is that we don’t have time to properly document what’s going on in there and to help anybody get set up, to say nothing of detailing what’s involved for maintenance (the DST conversion scripts are something to see).
Friday, March 19, 2010
Maxwell says:
jacob – I agree about the “pester” feature. Very handy for folks who use email for their todo list. Anthony, are you listening…?
Friday, March 19, 2010
Amy says:
Thanks for all the work you put into it; good luck with your other ongoing efforts.
Friday, March 19, 2010
Billy Gray says:
Thanks, Amy.
Maxwell, Jacob, Anthony — the pestering feature (and getting such a thing to place nicely with repetitive scheduling) ended up being the most difficult thing to build in the system. We went through three or four revisions before settling on the current system, and this was all back when I was still pretty new to Ruby, to say nothing of Rails.
When I get a chance I’ll try to post some code and outline how we approached it. I’d really love to have a discussion at some point (if anybody’s interested) about how to better approach such a system. I’m sure there are better ways to go about it.
Friday, March 19, 2010
Troy Van Houten says:
Yea, the ‘pester’ feature is the best part of the PingMe tool (for me). Unless someone can point me elsewhere, there does not seem to be any other tool out there that has the pester feature (without scheduling multiple back to back reminders). I’m certainly going to be in failure mode for awhile until I can find another tool to fill the huge gap of losing PinMe as my personal reminder tool to my phone. Task.fm is about 50% of what PingMe is, but perhaps that’s all I can expect. Any advice is appreciated on a similar PingMe tool… Troy Van Houten, Boise Idaho, USA
Friday, March 19, 2010
Anthony Feint says:
Maxwell, We are working on a Pester feature but Task.fm does have repetitive reminders. At the moment you can type something into Task.fm like “remind me to walk the dog every 20 minutes”. We do have repetitive scheduling. The pester feature we’re currently working on will allow you to snooze a reminder and have sent back to you at a defined time.
In regards to features – our entire approach at Task.fm is reliability and ease of use. When working with so many API’s, things can easily go wrong and these reminder system are very complex. I have no intention of expanding Task.fm to have as many features as other products.
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Antonio says:
The pestering features of pigme are (were? sigh!) absolutely unbeatable, because they allow stopping pestering alarms by email!!!
I have just a simple idea on how to reproduce they parlially and have everybody built its own reminder and pestering service.
If I will have success in a short time, I will come back to this page and update it with another post.
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Antonio says:
I forgot: I am too sad to believe that pingme closes. Anyhow, Thank you very, very, very much for your wonderful service.
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Maxwell says:
Anthony – Not overdoing the features is a fine idea. Easy-to-use tools that do a few things well are always welcome.
One quick suggestion after using Task.fm the past couple of days: show reminders created by email on the web page. That way, they can be verified and, if necessary, edited. A good general UI rule is that every user action should generate a response so the user knows their action was recognized.
Saturday, March 20, 2010
willemijns says:
i notice anthony feist try to sell his service task.fm but he forget to inform
than his service was down during 3/4 days in summer 2009 i’m not sure he is not aloce when he spoke with “we” word ^^
Reminder online services is an important thing on the internet. Some
rendez-vous are very important and i give my trust (security/QoS) to my
e-mail provider and these kind of services as gopinge (RIP now)
too many services forgot QoS !!! it is a fact !!! in my list (url given above) i have ejected 60% of task.fm/pingme competitors this is very abnormal !!!
they was very nice GUI services on it which cost thounsands of dev work ejected coz they are down during X days…
since 558 days (today) gopingme was serious to send me every days the test messages i have asked.
Due to these bad QoS of services (and the laziness and the fact to be azngry angry to changing of services every month or trimester and typing again and again my 30 reminders) i have choosen to create myself in PHP my own reminders script copied on 5 webhosters with help of 5 cronjobs service. Now i’m quiet.
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Anthony Feint says:
Willemjns – not sure where you got the 3/4 stat from. The web interface was down for around 30 minutes – but thats it. Get in touch – maybe there was an issue with your account, and I’ll see if I can fix it.
Maxwell – I’ll look into that. Something like that will create a lot of extra server load, but we are working on something similar.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
jacob says:
@Anthony I have tried your service and find it very capable with the exception of it’s lack of a “pester” or “snooze” feature as you called it.
@Billy Ok … so the open source idea is out :(. In the article it was mentioned that there would not be enough support to monetize it. I know I would be willing to pay for a monthly/annual subscription to keep the service and I am sure many others feel the same. Maybe you should take a user poll to see just how many of us would pay and at what price point? In addition maybe you could eliminate some features such as SMS to lighten the load as all cell phone providers provide the ability to receive TXT messages via email anyhow and if a user really needs pings via TXT can use their cell phone providers email address to achieve the same result while eliminating that burden on your staff. Maybe there are some other features that are time consuming to support that could also be eliminated … just as long as the “pester” feature remains … :). Just some thoughts … not wanting to go down without a fight!
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Leatte Wigen says:
I’m very sad about this decision. I depend on pingme every day & love how I can get sms messages about everything. The feature to reschedule while on the go is the best part. I will miss this service soooo much!! If you do take a poll, I’m willing to pay for this servie. Im not sure what will or could replace it. If for some reason you decide (cross fingers) to continue, I’m here with ya!! Such a sad day!!
Monday, March 22, 2010
Mark says:
you guys suck. this is a great product that I use regularly and have recommended to alot of other people. Can I have the domain name if your not using it?
Monday, March 22, 2010
Troy Van Houten says:
For the record, I too would pay for the PingMe service if it were to be kept alive – if that’s possible.
Monday, March 22, 2010
Ruth says:
Wow. I’m really going to miss you guys. PingMe is my brain. First Sandy, now you. I checked out Ping.fm and it looks like it can handle everything I need. I didn’t use the Pester feature & I don’t use SMS so I think I’ll be ok.
But you guys were awesome. I’ll miss you!
Monday, March 22, 2010
Ruth says:
By Ping.fm I meant Task.fm, of course. :P
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
jrk says:
Anthony: the essential missing features in Task.FM, in my usage, are:
With those two things, I think many of us would be quite happy to start moving over. If they come soon, I’d even write an importer for the PingMe export format if you did so soon. (Do you have an API?)
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
jrk says:
(Oh, and confirming every reminder creation via email is very noisy. For heavy users, there should be an option to only reply on failure to parse/create an item.)
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
cosmicrepairdude says:
In case anyone is still considering RememberTheMilk, here is a comment I posted in June 2009 on several sites with RTM reviews about why I would not trust it:
Here’s why I think RTM sucks: it’s unreliable. After deciding I needed a weekly reminder, I decided to compare RTM and PingMe around 6 months ago. I set up 2 repeating tasks on each, my regular Thursday task and a daily reminder that would indicate to me whether the services were reliable and trustworthy. PingMe has worked flawlessly. RTM stopped sending me the daily reminder after 4 days. Their weekly reminder continued to work, though, until a couple weeks ago when it suddenly stopped. When I tried to get help from RTM, all I got was a BS automated response, no actual help or acknowledgment of a problem. When I had a problem with PingMe’s interface, they responded to my query with help, an apology, and thanks for pointing out their instructions had been unclear.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
cosmicrepairdude says:
Me again. I’ve just set up all my repeating reminders with task.fm, MemoToMe, and Google Calendar. I’ll see how it goes over the next few weeks and report back here. I wasn’t crazy about Google Calendar, because I end up with a calendar full of stuff I wouldn’t normally put on a calendar and it was the most difficult to figure out at first. But it got easier. The other 2 were easy right off the bat.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
cosmicrepairdude says:
jrk, I don’t know why you’re saying that task.fm doesn’t put the reminder in the subject line, it did in mine.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
cosmicrepairdude says:
1st day results of my tests of task.fm, MemoToMe, and Google Calendar:
They all sent me reminders. Only MemoToMe did not put the reminder in the subject line. I’ve emailed their service dept. to ask if this is going to get fixed, as it’s a deal breaker for me, especially using Gmail which lumped all the reminders together since they all had the same subject line.
Google Calendar sends an email with a very cluttered looking subject line because it not only has the reminder but also the start time and and end time arbitrarily set at one hour later. I don’t need the start time shown and I certainly don’t need to see a meaningless end time. I’m sure I could adjust this to at least get rid of the end time, but that makes it more fiddly and more user unfriendly, which it already is. So task.fm is winning after one day, but reliability will be the most important factor, so we’ll see how that goes.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Maxwell says:
@cosmicrepairdude –
Thanks for the update. I think MemoToMe has a “Platinum” version that puts the reminder in the subject line, so I doubt they will start doing this for the free version. Bummer – I would use them otherwise.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Peter says:
Another reminder option is timecave.com. They have both a free and a subscription level, but the subscription is only $12 annually.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Maxwell says:
And I just found another: Remindd.com
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Maxwell says:
@Peter – The $12/yr subscription for timecave.com is required to get repeating reminders.
And it looks like Remindd requires a paid subscription for repeats too, but I think you can get by for $2/yr (it’s a little unclear) if you don’t mind putting up with ads, or $5 otherwise. I am still waiting for my reminder to arrive to see what it looks like….
Friday, March 26, 2010
Maxwell says:
task.fm update
I just tried task.fm’s SMS feature, sending three messages, and got an email message saying:
“Your balance on Task.fm is very low. Visit the members area and upgrade to a “Pro Account” NOW!!"
Interesting, since the web site says the free account gets 15 SMS messages a month. Hmmm….
Remindd update
So far no reminder. Should have arrived two hours ago. I don’t even see the reminder when I log back in. Maybe I did something wrong, or….
Friday, March 26, 2010
cosmicrepairdude says:
I just tried LetterMeLater, and discovered that you can’t schedule more than 20 repeats, so it’s useless for daily or weekly reminders, which I need.
Friday, March 26, 2010
carielewyn says:
i would gladly pay for this service; it was a big part of my daily routine.
i used it for everything from trash day to carpool reminders to what time random satellites would pass so i could go outside and look for them. and how many birthdays would i have forgotten without pingme?
thank you for a great product :) it will be missed!
i guess i’m about to spend most of the day searching for a new pingme replacement :(
a lot of the ones you guys listed are mainly e-mail reminders, though. what i loved most about pingme was the text message alerts. and the sticky-note-esque interface online was pretty cool, too.
so far i’m not thrilled with task.fm and it’s limit of 5 free texts per month. i use 5 per day on most days :) but i suppose if it’s reliable i would pay for it just like i would pay for pingme.
Friday, March 26, 2010
Billy Gray says:
> i used it for everything from trash day to carpool reminders to what time random satellites would pass so i could go outside and look for them.
That is so awesome. Thanks for the great feedback!
As I’ve told a couple of folks by email, while we really appreciate the offers to pay for the service, it would be quite a bit of work for us to bolt on a payment system and we simply don’t have the time to do it right now. On top of that, we’re not convinced that we could collect enough revenue to hire a full time engineer/developer to keep the service running.
Friday, March 26, 2010
L W says:
I’m soooo sad. I just can’t find anything that works as great as pingme!!!! PLEASE don’t go!!! I will pay :( I’m sorry but I’m so frustrated in trying to find anything that can compare to this service, I’m trying everything out but nothing is a good as pingme!! If I find something, I will let everyone know. So far, no go yet.
Saturday, March 27, 2010
cosmicrepairdude says:
Thanks, Maxwell, yes I see MemoToMe has the reminder in the subject line if you pay, which would explain, I guess, why they have ignored my 2 emails asking about this. Since all I need is repeatable email reminders, no fancy stuff, I don’t bother reading about the premium levels of service. Now that I’ve given up on MemoToMe and LettereMeLater, I’m still looking for something to compare to Task.fm and Google Calendar for reliability and ease of use.
Saturday, March 27, 2010
cosmicrepairdude says:
Thanks to willemijns’ list, I’m now testing zreminder.com and mymemorizer.com
Sunday, March 28, 2010
cosmicrepairdude says:
zreminder doesn’t let you choose what time you want your reminder to arrive. It sends it between midnight and 5am. That doesn’t work for me, so I’ve added Zoho Planner to the test.
Monday, March 29, 2010
L W says:
cosmicrepairdude, thanks for the updates. I keep coming back for more info, so please don’t stop.
Monday, March 29, 2010
cosmicrepairdude says:
Update:
Anthony, I’ve just found something about Task.fm’s interface that I’m not crazy about. If you have more than 10 pending reminders, the page that lists them only shows 10, you have to click on “2” or “Next” at the bottom to see the rest. Why can’t the page just get longer as you add more – wouldn’t that be simpler?
Zoho Planner has a very simple and elegant interface, aside from the tricky and peculiar time zone setting.
I went to “settings”, set my time zone and didn’t pay any attention to the “current time zone” on the left side of my list page, which as it turned out, still had me in the default (wrong) time zone. You have to click on that, which opens another dropdown menu to set it properly. Then I had to reset all my times, as they had been shifted 3 hours. I gather this feature is so that the “settings” setting is your home zone, and the one on the list (interface) page is for when you’ve traveled to a different time zone, your reminders will reflect that.
MyMemorizer is similar in appearance to Google Calendar, in that your reminders are shown on a monthly calendar grid, rather than a list, and the box where you enter your reminder info is kind of busy looking. There’s no AM or PM, you have to use 23:00 instead of 11pm, for example. It has 2 different places to enter the time, and I was filling in both, but then I realized I could ignore the time setting at the top, for the start and stop times of the event, and just set the time I want the email sent, which is lower down. So that got simpler.
Google Calendar, aside from what I have already said about it above, has an annoying habit of giving me an error message, “Oops, we couldn’t create this event, please try again in a few minutes” frequently after I’ve entered my info and clicked Save. The weird thing is that sometimes, even though it says that, I can see the event on my calendar, but when I try to edit or look at it, by double clicking, I get a message that says “(Still saving changes…)”. I’m about ready to give up on this one as it happens frequently and it’s pretty annoying to have to enter all my info a second time in order for it to stick.
So I’m down to 3 that seem to work well.
I will continue to watch them all for dropped reminders and any other issues.
Monday, March 29, 2010
cosmicrepairdude says:
Billy,
I don’t know if this page we’re on will continue to exist after April 23, so we may not have a convenient place to discuss all this stuff. Can you keep it going?
Monday, March 29, 2010
Billy Gray says:
CosmicRepairDude,
Please, be our guest! We’ve no intention of taking down blog pages, etc, and this will help people looking for more information.
Thanks for posting all your findings!
Monday, March 29, 2010
cosmicrepairdude says:
I just found a fix that worked for me with the Google Calendar error message problem that I found on http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Calendar/thread?tid=3f80a4ae3523e2c0&hl=en
Reloading the page gets it working properly again, which means, as a useful preventative, remembering to reload the page every time I need to add a new reminder.
I see from reading that whole page that this fix does not seem to work for everyone, though.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Kevin says:
Try the reminder function of Backpackit.com. Free account available. Sends nice clean SMS with reminder in subject field. Seems to work well.
Kevin
Thursday, April 01, 2010
ap_ says:
I just wanted to find out what most people switched to. I don’t like Task.fm because I can’t snooze from email, and no other service seems to have enough features to replace sandy/pingme.
Friday, April 02, 2010
cosmicrepairdude says:
ap_, Have you looked at Zoho Planner? I don’t know whether it has all you need, but it seems to have a lot of features and a whole suite of other online apps.
Friday, April 02, 2010
cosmicrepairdude says:
Did anyone else have a problem with Task.fm today?
I did not get my morning reminder and when I just went to my account, my reminder list was empty. I clicked on a few links to see what I could find and got a couple of “unable to connect to database” error messages. Finally, after clicking my browser’s Back button, I got my list back, up to date. But if I refresh the page the list disappears again. Then I get it back by clicking the reminders tab. I wonder if they’re making adjustments to it today. I just sent myself a test reminder which did not arrive and just had another database error message.
Sunday, April 04, 2010
Maxwell says:
@cosmicrepairdude – Yep, task.fm has been flaky here too. I set up a weekly Saturday reminder, which arrived as scheduled. But then I got the same reminder on Wednesday and then again on Friday. The real bummer is I am pretty sure I set up reminders for those days, but of course now that they are over, they do not appear on task.fm, since it does not archive old reminders.
Soooo… thanks for the tip on Zoho Planner. I am trying it out and it looks okay but rather bare-bones. No SMS or voice messages, no fancy natural language processing, no way to create a reminder by email (that I can see), no pester feature, no archive of old reminders. But it does put the reminder title in the subject line, which is good. If it just saved old reminders, it would work fine for me.
Sunday, April 04, 2010
L W says:
I have had a few hiccups with task.fm too. I’m trying out springpadit.com & backpackit.com. Both are pretty good. Still not complete like pingme but getting close. I can only find a few with hourly reminders but no way to stop them on the go. I’m still looking.
Sunday, April 04, 2010
Maxwell says:
@cosmicrepairdude – Bah – the disappearing task.fm reminders bug just bit me too. Not ready for prime time
@L W – Thanks for the springpadit.com tip – trying it out. Looks like it is down to Zoho or SpringPad.
Sunday, April 04, 2010
jrk says:
Regarding “putting the reminder in the subject line” I meant on input, not output. i.e. I want the ability to set a new reminder by sending an email containing the entire command in the subject line, not having to drop down and write the reminder expression in the body.
Sunday, April 04, 2010
jrk says:
After years of hopping around between services, none of which exactly fit my own ideal usage model (though PingMe came the closest for the longest), I’ve started hacking up a fork of Remindify which is email-centric:
http://github.com/jrk/remindify
It’s not especially pretty so far, but it works for basic creation and snoozing via email, and is hostable on AppEngine. I’m running my own instance, but could open it up to a few people if anyone is interested and tolerant of potential flakiness.
Writing a PingMe importer is among the next things on my list.
Send me a note (or message me on GitHub) if you’re interested: 5v9bnwz2qk@snkmail.com
Monday, April 05, 2010
kew says:
@L W – Thanks for the tip about Springpadit. I’m going to give it a try because I haven’t found task.fm to be reliable either. (I haven’t been able to login to my account and am getting the “unable to connect to server” message that others have been getting too.)
Just FYI for others: Springpadit doesn’t offer repeating tasks :(
Monday, April 05, 2010
cosmicrepairdude says:
Task.fm seems to be up and running again after taking the Easter weekend off. I wonder if we’ll get an explanation as to what happened along with reassurances that it won’t happen again.
Maxwell, Task.fm stores my expired reminders. All my one-time reminders from last week are still there.
If springpadit doesn’t have repeating reminders, it’s useless to me, as many of my reminders are repeating, some daily, some weekly, some monthly.
Monday, April 05, 2010
Maxwell says:
@cosmicrepairdude – Yep, after some clicking around and refreshing, my reminders at task.fm are back. And the old ones too. But today, a 1pm reminder never arrived, and some of my contacts have disappeared. Man, it is just way too flaky.
springpadit.com does support repeats. You may have to create an alarm, not some other type of item – the list is a bit bewildering, isn’t it? But I think this is the one I will go with. It has the critical features I use:
- puts reminder title in subject line
- saves old reminders
- supports repeats
- can send to different email addresses
Wish it had pester too, but I can live with this much.
Monday, April 05, 2010
cosmicrepairdude says:
Thanks, Maxwell.
Yes, I see springpadit will repeat reminders if you call it an event, but not if you call it a task – whatever. OK, tryin’ that one now….
Tuesday, April 06, 2010
L W says:
Actually SpringPadIT does do repeating. I use the Alarm option not the Event. It has alot of other features too. Looks very promising but I wish it had a pestering feature too. Maybe in the future.
Tuesday, April 06, 2010
cosmicrepairdude says:
Task.fm has just failed again, so that’s it for them. Too bad, I liked the interface.
So now I’m watching myMemorizer.com, Zoho Planner, Springpad, and Google Calendar.
Tuesday, April 06, 2010
cosmicrepairdude says:
Thanks L W and Maxwell, I see that alarms and events both can repeat in Springpad, but alarms are simpler to enter.
Wednesday, April 07, 2010
kew says:
Thanks everyone for the info that SpringPadIt does repeating through the Alarm option instead of Events…
Wednesday, April 07, 2010
Maxwell says:
@cosmicrepairdude – myMemorizer.com looks like a good possibility. I have seen some flaky behavior in the UI (like not responding to a Save button) but the basic features are there and the calendar view is nice.
Thursday, April 08, 2010
L W says:
Task.fm has failed again. No reminders sent or even show up on the website. I entered 2 new ones & they didn’t even appear. Oh well, Springpadit is doing good for me. Now if they could just do pestering.
Thursday, April 08, 2010
L W says:
WOW, I jsut logged out of task.fm & relogged in and everything was there again. I still have not received my reminders today. Weird & not too reliable.
Thursday, April 08, 2010
Hugo says:
I’d like to thank everyone who’s posted to this thread for doing my legwork for me. Brass tacks, of all the ones you’ve tried out, which one (not “ones”) comes closest to our beloved PingMe, in terms of reliability, repeating, simplicity and SMS support? I know that none of them offers pestering.
Thursday, April 08, 2010
cosmicrepairdude says:
Hugo, so far, for me, only myMemorizer.com and Zoho Planner have been glitch-free. Don’t know about SMS – you can check that out.
Friday, April 09, 2010
Hugo says:
Thanx, cosmicrepairdude. I definitely need SMS reminders. E-mail is so 20th-century.
Friday, April 09, 2010
Hugo says:
I just checked out Zoho Planner and am able to confirm what Maxwell posted. It doesn’t appear to have support for SMS. The e-mail reminders have regular e-mail headers and are therefore too wordy to send to an Email-To-SMS Gateway. It also doesn’t appear to save old reminders.
Friday, April 09, 2010
cosmicrepairdude says:
All my old used-up Zoho reminders are are at the bottom of my Zoho Planner home page under the heading “Completed…”
Friday, April 09, 2010
cosmicrepairdude says:
There’s another one called 30 Boxes that apparently does SMS. I’m not trying it yet til I ditch one of the ones I’ve still got going.
Friday, April 09, 2010
Hugo says:
Thanx for the info cosmicrepairdude.
Friday, April 09, 2010
L W says:
I’m using Gubb.net too, well for somethings. It’s been reliable but I not as fond of how it lists things. I’m using it for a grocery list. It’s nice that I can sms an item to the list and just sms a ‘g’ to it to get the entire list back. The reminders come it on time & I haven’t had any problems with them. I’m wanting to get pestering & to be able to send messages to my kids too. Gubb does not do this.
30 Boxes it ok. I set a hourly repeat for last Wed and it only sent the 1st one. Not reliable for the hourly thing. The ones I have set for weekly have come it but I really haven’t tested it too much. I’m really liking SpringPadIt & BackPack as a second choice. Task.fm has completely failed for me. He gave me 2 months of the PRO account but the stuff keeps disappearing from the site & I haven’t gotten any sms’ in days. Hope this helps.
Saturday, April 10, 2010
L W says:
Go figure, task.fm is working again. I just went to the site my reminders are there again. I reset them for 30 min. difference & I jsut received 2 reminders. Maybe they fixed the site, hopefully.
Saturday, April 10, 2010
cosmicrepairdude says:
L W, does that mean you complained to them and got a response? I sent more than 1 message to them, both through their site and email and never got any response and of course Anthony stopped posting here as soon as problems cropped up. That made it really easy for me to drop them. A waste of time IMHO.
On the other hand, I had a problem with Springpad which I sent them a message about. They responded very quickly and efficiently, kept up a dialog with me to nail it down, and fixed it. That’s service. Hopefully they fixed it permanently.
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Billy Gray says:
FWIW, taking on a pile of new users at once can create some daunting support load, especially for a small shop. Old bugs you had been meaning to fix are suddenly front-and-center and it can be a lot of unplanned-for work.
That said, I continue to be surprised by how very important good support turn-around is for customer retention. Makes sense, but lately I’ve bee thinking it’s even more important than development. Ironic, no?
Saturday, April 10, 2010
cosmicrepairdude says:
I have just officially given up on Google Calendar. It’s just way too flaky. Once again I got an error message after entering a new event, the usual strategy of refreshing the page did not work. They also missed sending me a reminder a few days ago. I can’t understand why this is such a piece of garbage when Gmail is so superior to its competition. That’s why I continued the experiment so long – disbelief that Google could have such a crappy product.
Saturday, April 10, 2010
cosmicrepairdude says:
As a tip for those wanting to test reliability, here’s how I do it:
I set up the same daily repeating test reminder on each site – same name and same time – so that they will all arrive together and be listed right next to each other in my inbox. That way it’s really easy to see if they all arrived or not. This reminder is called “this is a test”. In addition, I enter all my real reminders into each one, again using the same name and arrival time for easy comparison. So it’s really obvious if I get all 4 or only 3 or whatever.
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Maxwell says:
It’s down to SpringPad and MyMemorizer for me. They have been consistent so far with reminders, and both support all the features I want (well, except pester, of course…) I have not tested SMS with either one but it appears they both support it.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Maxwell says:
Okay, SpringPad does send SMS reminders – be sure to remember the country code, though. MyMemorizer requires that you verify your SMS number, and so far (over 10 minutes now) I have not received a verification message even though they say it has been sent. (And I tried both with and without a country code.) Also, it looks like MyMemorizer limits you to 2 SMS messages per day on a free account. That’s no biggie for me, but if it does not work at all, that’s a bummer. I prefer MyMemorizer’s interface, but SpringPad is taking the edge for me by actually working.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Maxwell says:
I spoke too soon – what I thought was an SMS from SpringPad was actually sent to my email address. (The interface does invite mistakes like that.) So far, no SMS from either SpringPad or MyMemorizer.
Anyone else have luck with SMS from any of the candidates?
Sunday, April 11, 2010
L W says:
cosmicrepairdude, no I did not email them about this. I have exchanged a few emails with Anthony (I used the email he listed here) at the end of March. I just stumbled upon the reminders working again.
I’m really like SpringPadit. It’s the closes this to PingMe so far. The only thing is when I send in an email, it comes in as a note, not a reminder. When I get home, I convert it to what time I need it to be. Maybe they will change this in the future. I have not contacted them at all but I happy to hear that they responded fast.
Maxwell, I haven’t had any problems with SpringPadIt. All my reminders, even the ones I sent my kids, have worked. There are alot of features on this site. I’m mainly using the Alarm feature right now but I can see how I will be using more of their features later when time premits me to explore them more.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Billy Gray says:
I should note that any service providing reminders over Twitter provides you SMS reminders in countries where Twitter supports that robustly. Reliable SMS support is difficult and Twitter has put in the legwork to be that transport ;-)
Monday, April 12, 2010
Damian says:
Hey folks,
Just another contribution to the mix: I’ve been using MyEmailReminders.com; they don’t have all the features of PingMe, but they’re pretty good. More importantly, the SMS & email reminders come through on time consistently, at least in the last month or so I’ve been using the service.
Monday, April 12, 2010
L W says:
Thanks Damian, I’m testing it now.
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Maxwell says:
@Damian – MyEmailReminders looks very nice (SMS, alt email addresses, repeats, clean UI) but so far no messages have arrived for me. I DID get a verification SMS message, so something works, but four one-time reminders (both SMS and email) and a daily repeating reminder have not arrived at all. Maybe I am setting it up wrong, but it seems pretty straightforward.
Anyone else having good/bad luck with them?
Friday, April 16, 2010
Maxwell says:
MyEmailReminders is now working for me. They send a nice “Welcome” message but neglect to warn you in advance that you need to click on a link in that message to confirm your address. Otherwise, you cannot send reminders, and there is no indication in the web interface that the account is unconfirmed. This is one of several small rough edges I have encountered, but overall I like it. AND they responded to my support request, unlike SpringPad and MyMemorizer. Big plus.
Still in the running for me, in rough order of preference:
MyEmailReminders
MyMemorizer (but cannot get SMS to work)
SpringPad (but cannot get SMS to work)
AirSet (designed more for meetings than reminders)
Saturday, April 17, 2010
L W says:
Maxwell, have you verified your phone with SpringPadit? Make an alarm. Where it says ‘To’ click the little box before the word email. It will give you a list. Click add & manage. Add your name & phone number. Click send verification. You should get it on your phone. I did not have any luck with sending a sms back but I was able to use the web to send in the verification code. the link will be in the sms, you can use your PC. I hope this helps.
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Maxwell says:
L W – Yep, I have tried this several times, both with and without a country code on the phone number. Never got a verification message. I posted on SpringPad’s Get Satisfaction forum (which seems to be their support method) but have had no reply.
Saturday, April 17, 2010
cosmicrepairdude says:
Maxwell, I was just looking at that forum and can’t see your question – did you see mine? I used the same name as I do here, did you? As you can see from the other posts there, they seem to respond within a day or 2. My issue with them revealed a systemic problem, which took them a few days to rejig and rewrite, but they kept in contact with me and thanked me for helping them find the problem.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Maxwell says:
Hi cosmicrepairdude – Over on Get Satisfaction, I am dougfertie. I posted my comment on a thread from another user with the same problem. [http://getsatisfaction.com/springpartners/topics/phone_verification-16166] Devin from SpringPad made some suggestions there, which I followed and the OP followed, and it did not help either of us. No response from SpringPad for a month. Glad you had better luck, but I am leaning even more strongly to MyEmailReminders.
Monday, April 19, 2010
Katin from Springpad says:
Hey guys – Glad to see all of the discussion here & so many of you trying out Springpad! If I can be of any help at all, please don’t hesitate to contact me: katin@springpartners.com
Friday, April 23, 2010
Jared Rimer says:
I tried task.fm and its a fail as a free service. One part doesn’t quite say what the free service has, and not only that, but I don’t know how to get messages to it via SMS. On top of that, once signed up, you only get 5 SMS/voice calls a month for free although on another part of the site says 15 a month. Also, once I signed up for a subscription, my stuff disappeared, and I got no reminders. I E-mailed asking for assistance and got no response but my stuff came back. I cancelled my subscription, but may re-signup when it expires for a pro account as I do need a reminder service. I have Onebox which is a toll-free service, (paid) but it has calendar reminder services too. May just use that. Pingme, you’ll be missed, I talked about it on my technology blog and podcast and yes I tried remember the milk for a replacement for Sandy. It blows. Why couldn’t we pay for pingme? I’d pay.
Friday, April 23, 2010
cosmicrepairdude says:
Jared, just a gentle and friendly suggestion to read the other posts above yours. If you had, you would have seen that we’ve already covered all that about Task.fm not working and found services that do work.
Friday, April 23, 2010
Adrian says:
I tried task.fm and found so many problems. The natural language is very poor. For example could not understand lunch in 1 week 3pm. I tried so many times to enter but it wouldn’t get it right. Even if I entered the time, it would default to some strange time (10:03am always for some reason).
Saturday, May 01, 2010
susan says:
how about charging $9 per year?
Sunday, May 16, 2010
cosmicrepairdude says:
Update: Springpad, myMemorizer.com and Zoho Planner are all still working fine for me as email reminders. I’m not planning to try any others unless one of these craps out or retires.
Monday, May 17, 2010
Maxwell says:
I am 2/3 in agreement with cosmicrepairdude.
MyEmailReminders is working fine for me and I have not been using anything else for a last three weeks or so.
Zoho is a good alternative, and is my alternative if something happens with MyEMailReminders.
But SpringPad never did solve the issues I had with SMS messages. I am using Google Voice for SMS, and it looks like that just does not work with SpringPad. I have not heard anything from them for almost a month.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Thomas says:
Hi,
I just arrived, and its a bummer to hear a great service will not be supported. Have you considered releasing the software under some open source licence?
Cheers
Monday, May 31, 2010
PingLess says:
Too bad… it’s like a lost a worker. Seriously would have paid for it. What was the security issue? Would it be possible to allow select users to provide and maintain code?
Monday, July 05, 2010
hamad alromaithi says:
will u sale this web .. if u will sale it let me know plz
zy2@hotmail.co.uk
Monday, August 30, 2010
Antonio says:
As anticipated, today I have a solution for all the guys who miss a lot a (simple) web reminder with pestering support.
Details here:
http://www.antoniorinaldi.it/build-your-own-email-pestering-reminder-using-google-docs/
Hoping it will be useful for someone.