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
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
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Add contacts to your account (requires login)
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.
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
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
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.
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…
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.
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.
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