Saying Goodbye to PingMe

2010-03-17 20:00:00 -0400

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

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