tracking packages

Yes.

this is a great idea. I'm finding all kinds of things I want Sandy to do!

Awesome idea! That would be a great job for a personal assistant. :-)

While one of the developers would have to confirm or deny... I suspect that it would be difficult to implement different tasks, such as a status check vs. a delivery notification.

What would be awesome, and I think doable, would be a "track" verb that triggers Sandy to go get status on the package. The return email could then include a link to the shipper's tracking site. I don't know if you could really have Sandy provide delivery confirmation though.

it's software, you can do anything :-)

This would be awesome and I second that I'm not really expecting Sandy to be able to differentiate between the package status and it being delivered. This is already being done on the Shipping company side in most cases. You can sign up to receive e-mails when a package is delivered or there is a hold up. If Sandy could just sign you up for that e-mail that would be perfect.

Ideally you could also do "Sandy, track 1Z12345 @daily" and she would just email the status once a day until you cancelled it.

Great idea! It must be possible, because you can track packages (via UPS, FedEx, USPS, and DHL) on Bloglines. I assume this uses RSS, and if it does, Sandy can get the info too.

I'd have to imagine that package tracking would be a minor part of the overall queue each day. Couldn't Sandy be set up to check for status differences every few hours until she "sees" a delivery confirmation? Certainly the major carriers all have APIs for this to call.

This would be unbelievably useful. Please make this!

That would be fantastic!!

This is a surprisingly insightful and clever idea. In one respect it's a one-off feature that's somewhat orthogonal to the rest of what Sandy does, but in practice I think it's a *brilliant* one-off feature that fits particularly well into both the way you interact with Sandy (email requests and reminders/updates, iCal/RSS subscriptions, and explicit email queries) and the virtual assistant metaphor. Potentially a very useful and very natural/intuitive addition.

Brilliant idea. +1