Unanswered discussions in I want Sandy

This may be a problem. I told Sandy, "Remind me to review Roomba Repair Situation on Saturday." She replied:

Hrm. I couldn't find this anywhere. Might you already have deleted it?

I put this on the calendar:

#1 Sat, 7/26 Review Roomba Repair Situation
- email reminder at 8:00am
etc...

I have the full message, but it is not yet clear to me why she thought I was updating or deleting something.

Sandy keeps emailing me the same message, "I got your email but couldn't find anything you asked me to do. Let's see if we can quickly remedy that:"

I've deleted the appointment and replied to the service asking it to forget it. Still no luck.

I don't know how to use Sandy anymore. What are your use with Sandy? Usually i just drop my Events in iCal, sync to my iPod Touch, Mobile phone.. So i can edit both way.

Sandy is useful if i am writing email to others, and i want Sandy to remind them.. i put her on C.C.

Beside that, i don't know how to use Sandy now.. i think i may got to retrench her haha.

Moses

Howdy!

I wanted to provide a quick status update on Sandy's Twittering abilities following yesterday's Twitter congestion [http://getsatisfaction.com/iwantsandy...] due in no small part to WWDC [http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/] and the sheer number of people following the "Stevenote" [http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net...].

The Twitter status blog reports that the "API request limit has been restored to 20 per hour." Sandy talks to Twitter as much as she's allowed — which means she'll be picking up your tweets every 3 minutes or so given the current rate limit.

If you happen to notice any Twitter updates before we do, please do share the latest here with your fellow Sandy clients!

Best,

Rael

I think pretty far..,

Guys and gals, this (iwantSandy.com) is a fantastic idea for an online service, let me start by saying that. I've signed up and I have to admit, it's pretty cool what you have done so far.

I know this is only the tip of the iceberg, as the system evolves with time it will get better and better. The purpose of this discussion is to encourage other users to lay out their ideas about what this service may look like in a couple of years if taken to the next level.

To start, here are a few of my thoughts, as they seem like the logical evolution path for such web app:

1) As customer base grows, more money is injected in the infrastructure to make the pages load fast.

2) As mobile phones get more and more integrated with the cloud, so will this service. Eventually, this service should be able to synch with your mobile phone's speech recognition system, so that you can talk to Sandy and tell her your to do's instead of typing. (forget about typing..)

3) As other electronics get online and part of the cloud, Sandy, should follow as well, so as to truly become an online assistant wherever you go. (car GPS, mobile phone, any pc on the web, etc)

4) As your electronics become "smarter" you will be able to do more with sandy, more than just recording or retrieving data.. you should be able to send commands or request actions to be done (i.e: simple ones, check email, what's my calendar look like today, clear my day's appointments, send email to ..person... telling them.. , blog this, read me top news, check my site stats, report on home security system,etc)..

anyways, .. this was a quick brain dump of what might happen if this thing gets loose and wild..

share your thoughts..

p.s: I think this type of post should be done for every prod out there, so that people can get not only feedback about how the app or service is working, but feedback on how it will look like in the future.. remember collective feedback/decisions are usually smarter or more accurate that those of a single entity

G

I'm thinking about having two Sandy accounts - one for home/personal and one for work.

Yeah, I know I can tag things @home and @work (or something similar), but the issue is that I want email reminders related to work stuff to go to my work address and reminders related to my home stuff to my personal address, and I do not believe there is anyway to do that with a single Sandy account. Likewise I want a work and personal digest.

And yeah, it will be a pain to move all my stuff to the new account...

And yeah again, I know David Allen says this distinction between home and work is blurred, but I'm not there yet :-) I fight hard to keep these things separate.

Anyway, before I take the plunge, anyone else wrestled with this?

I am reading Dreaming in Code right now. It looks like you guys are solving a lot of the thornier problems that the developers of Chandler (subject of the book) were running into.

I know that some of the textiness of Stikkit and I Want Sandy is related to Rael's earlier blosxom project. Where else are you getting your inspiration from?

Happy Monday!

Despite having just served up a large batch of fresh-baked features and fixes [http://getsatisfaction.com/iwantsandy...], we just couldn't help but strike while the oven was warm and make just a couple-three more.

—Rael

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NEW: Special tags: @birthday and @anniversary

It didn't take a rocket scientist to notice the co-occurrence of @birthday and @anniversary tags with the special tags @yearly or @annually. It just took a little time for us to twig to a simple solution: turning @birthday and @anniversary into special tags, of course!

Never miss another birthday or anniversary! Leave the remembering (and any angst) to Sandy.

To have Sandy remind you about a friend's birthday, write to her with the person's name, birth date, and tag it with @birthday like so:

> remember Mimi's birthday 7/8 @birthday

Sandy will schedule a repeating yearly reminder (just as if you'd used the @yearly or @annually tag).

May at least the one anniversary you remember be your own! Ask Sandy to remind you about your anniversary, your parents', your children's, your sibling's, ...

> remember Our anniversary Aug 15 1993 @anniversary

(A word of caution: be sure you've got that date right; there's nothing that deflates a hearty "Happy Anniversary!" quite like being off by a month.)

A hearty "Thank you!" goes out to Alex Foster for teasing the solution out of our brains with his detailed write-up on "Using IwantSandy to remember birthdays" [http://www.alexfoster.me.uk/2008/04/0...] — and for sporting his Sandy flair [http://iwantsandy.com/sandbox#flair]!

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TWEAKED: Saying "Thursday" on a Thursday

Now this is one that's perhaps harder to explain than to intuit (try saying it three times quickly yourself), but here goes:

Sandy now assumes that when you say "Thursday" on a Thursday you mean Thursday of next week rather than the Thursday of today.

Sandy's client JRK kindly noted that saying "Remind me to do something on Thursday afternoon" had Sandy confusingly scheduling that something for that very day (when that very day was a Thursday) when if that's what you actually meant, you'd have said "Remind me to do something this afternoon" [http://getsatisfaction.com/iwantsandy...]. Thanks, J!

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TWEAKED: Simpler, cleaner, shorter SMS

Squinting at a 5:30pm @weekly Sunday @home @todo reminder text/SMS from Sandy yesterday, it occurred to me just how much simpler, cleaner, and shorter Sandy's mobile reminders would be without the useful-yet-an-eyeful list of trailing tags.

And so, in the spirit of our optometric approach to fit and finish ("Better here... or here? A or B?"), we asked Sandy to leave those tags out of text/SMS reminders for what we believe is an improvement in both aesthetics and readability.

Better?

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TWEAKED: Your stuff sorted in reverse-chronological order

A recent update twiddled default sorting of "Your stuff" so that appointments and scheduled to-dos appear in chronological order; contacts, bookmarks, lists, and notes alphabetically. What was perhaps confusing was that the default (if you just chose "Your stuff" from Sandy's menu bar) also defaulted to alphabetical order.

So we've switched the default back to reverse-chronological order with your most recently updated stuff appearing first.

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DOCUMENTED: Time-zones, @birthday, and @anniversary

We've added details on Sandy's recently-announced [http://getsatisfaction.com/iwantsandy...] support for specifying time zones and the promotion of @birthday and @anniversary to special recurrence tags to Sandy's Guide and Cheatsheet.

Grab a fresh copy of Sandy's cheatsheet: http://iwantsandy.com/help/cheatsheet

=====

Howdy, folks!

I must apologize for our being a little on the quiet side over the past couple of weeks. We've been heads-down, hard at work on finishing, testing, documenting, and otherwise readying some features you've been asking for and bug fixes you've been asking for no longer. (And, I must admit, we took a much needed day or two off to spend with our families over Spring Break.)

Here, then, are the latest feature additions, bug subtractions, usefulness multiplications -- and absolutely nothing in the way of long-division ;-).

Enjoy!

Rael

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NEW: Toggle individual occurrences of repeating to-dos

One of most popular feature requests was the ability to toggle individual occurrences of a repeating (weekly, daily, monthly, ...) to-do. And now you can do just that — both on the Web and by email, SMS/text, and Twitter.

* On the web: Simply click the checkbox to the left of any repeating to-do and it'll be marked as done, leaving the upcoming occurrences as-yet-undone.

* By email, SMS/text, or Twitter: Reply to Sandy with an update as usual:
> update [#number of the item to update] @done

Find out more about updating things: http://iwantsandy.com/help/guide#update

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NEW: Update individual or future occurrences of repeating appointments, reminders, or to-dos

To update only the current occurrence of any repeating item, just ask Sandy to update it as usual:

> update [#number of the item to update] [text, date, time, and/or tag to update]

For example, let's say your weekly staff meeting has moved to Tuesday at 2pm this week:

> update #1 Tuesday at 2pm

To update all future occurrences including the current one, just include the recurrence tag with which the item is already tagged in your update:

> update [#number of the item to update] [text, date, time, and/or tag to update] [recurrence tag]

For example, perhaps the weekly staff meeting has moved to Tuesday permanently:

> update #1 Tuesday at 2pm @weekly

(The @weekly tag tells Sandy to update all future occurrences rather than just the current one.)

Find out more about update and recurrence: http://iwantsandy.com/help/guide#upda...

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NEW: Let Sandy do the time-zone calculations for you

Have a conference call at 4pm Europe/London (aka GMT) time? Flying from San Francisco at 7am PDT (or is it PST?), connecting through New York at 2pm EDT, then on Sydney for a noon lunch (Australia/Sydney aka GMT+10) on Thursday (or is it Friday?)? Sunday morning call with your grandmother in Arizona -- they don't do daylight savings, do they? Eek!

Your head has better things to do than time-zone calculations!

Tack a time-zone on to anything you're asking Sandy to remind you about and she'll figure out just when that is in your local time-zone and remind you when the time comes.

For example:

> Remind me about the sales conference call at 4pm Europe/London
> Remember San Francisco to New York 5/1 7am PDT - 2pm EDT
> Remind me about lunch in Sydney on Thursday at noon Australia/Sydney

A shout out to Ilya and TRONash for pointing out that Sandy should indeed be able to do this! [http://gsfn.us/t/fv5]

More date and time examples: http://iwantsandy.com/help/guide#date...

Set your time zone: https://iwantsandy.com/settings/datetime

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TWEAKED: Dial "R" for "Remember"

A few of you noticed that the shortcut "r" was sometimes mistaken by Sandy to mean "remind" — even when you didn't specify a date or time - surprising you with a reminder the next morning.

Sandy will now assume that by "r" you mean "remember" and not set a reminder unless you specify a date or time.

Have Sandy remember so you don't have to: http://iwantsandy.com/help/guide#reme...

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FIXED: Re-using your email address (and Twitter username)

Some of you ran into trouble signing up again using an email address that had previously been associated with another account. Others had similar trouble associating a Twitter username with a new account that had formerly been associated with another account.

This'll trouble you no longer! We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate the time you took to troubleshoot the issue with us.

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IMPROVED: Recognizing contacts

(Or, rather, not recognizing non-contacts.) Sandy is continually learning to discern the difference between people's names, their company's name, job titles, and so forth. Not to mention all those tracking numbers, phone numbers, and lottery winning numbers ;-). While you probably don't give it more than a moment's thought (if that), it's all actually rather complicated stuff.

We've spent some more time with Sandy over the past couple of weeks in our continuing effort to help her discern David Wells Bank from Wells Fargo Bank, tracking number from telephone number. If you've managed (mistakenly of course) to stump Sandy with any of these in the past, you'll no doubt find her much improved.

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DOCUMENTED: Notes

We've added a Help page on having Sandy remember assorted notes for you.

Visit: http://iwantsandy.com/help/notes

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TWEAKED: Twitter confirmations

A simple matter of mistiming meant that some of you weren't receiving Sandy's confirmation tweet on setting up Twitter interaction. Sandy would attempt to twitter you but the whole "I follow you; you follow me" thing hadn't yet been negotiated and so she'd find that you weren't (yet) a friend.

Sandy now assumes that mistiming is to blame and gives it another few tries at regular intervals before giving up (and letting us know).

We've also added a message to Sandy's site that pops up with instructions if for some reason you've not yet followed Sandy.

Twitter to and receive reminder tweets from Sandy: http://iwantsandy.com/settings/twitter

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And more on the way...

It would be great with Sandy could integrate with goog 411. For example:

Sandy, remind me to make reservations at PF Chang in Chicago at 7pm tomorrow and have them call me.

to initate a goog 411 transaction to my phone at 7pm..

I don't feel like Sandy is always handling relative dates quite right.

Today is Wednesday the 12th. If I say "Tuesday," Sandy thinks I mean Tuesday the 18th (which I think is right). But if I say "next Tuesday," she thinks I mean Tuesday the 25th -- when, in almost all cases, I mean Tuesday the 18th. (I assume that if I want to refer to a Tuesday after the 18th, I should specify it by date to avoid confusion -- wouldn't most people do the same?)

Hey Rael, yesterday Google ever so quietly released two-way sync between GCal and Outlook (older than 2007). Just wanted to give Sandy the heads up in case you didn't already know.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/0...

Mark D

Happy Wednesday, folks!

We've been heads-down here at Sandy Central: optimizing, tweaking, twiddling, fixing, and testing to help Sandy do an even better job of keeping you on time and on track.

TWEAKED: Even better understanding of Outlook email

Not to pick on Outlook, but of all the email programs Sandy receives email from, it's definitely been the most troublesome. The sheer combinatorics of versions and builds, Exchange-backed and stand-alone, and email formatting — all with their own idiosyncrasies — is mind-boggling.

As a result, Sandy's new HTML email template and some versions of Outlook (2003 or older) didn't play well together. (For specifics and symptoms, take a gander at: http://getsatisfaction.com/iwantsandy...)

Last night's build put a stop to that (at least in all instances we could track down, test, and handle). If Outlook is your primary email program, you should feel free to turn on Sandy's richer, prettier, more fun(ctional) "Rich Text (HTML)" email under "Formatting and attachments: Email Format" at http://iwantsandy.com/settings/email .

If you do find any residual quirkiness (http://getsatisfaction.com/iwantsandy...), please do let us know and we'll extend the fix to what is most likely yet another version of Outlook email. And of course if you find any of the above-mentioned quirkiness happening to you and you're _not_ using Outlook, please let us know that too.

OPTIMIZED: On-time reminders

Sandy's being noticed. And as such, she's taking on more clients and so more workload. And she's doing an admirable job of keeping up: reading more incoming email, tweets, jotts, and texts than you can imagine; remembering all you're asking her to; and getting your reminders delivered to you on time (within a reasonable window of a couple-three minutes).

But there have been certain times of the day when Sandy's hardly had time for a sip of her coffee, she's so many reminders to send. The result is that some of you have noticed reminders coming in a few minutes later than she — and we — would like. (Of course there are the odd exceptions where reminders arrive far later than that, and these we have been delving into on a case by case basis to figure out what's kept them: Sandy on the sending end, you on the receiving end, or somewhere in transit.)

So we rolled up our sleeves and tucked in to optimizing how reminders were being gathered, queued up for delivery, and routed. And we're pleased to report that Sandy's back to within her couple-three-minute acceptable Window. And we'll be working with her to bring that down still further.

Please do let us know if you notice out of the ordinary (or, indeed, anything wonderfully extraordinary — we love surprises too!).

—Rael

Howdy!

Our good friend Greg Borenstein over Ideas for Dozens has written up some wonderfully helpful articles on:

Working with Sandy via Twitter/SMS

A port of the fabulously useful "QuickSilver Append Trick" (for the incomparable QuickSilver on Mac OS X

And, my personal favorite of his write-ups — keeping things front-and-center using Safari's new Web Snippets feature

Greg writes:

I've made two Sandy-related widgets: one for my appointments for the month and one for my items tagged @computer. I use the @computer tag in a GTD-ish manner to specify TODO items that I can accomplish at my computer.

One of the big lessons I've learned from my attempts at doing GTD has been the importance of putting your inboxes and other TODOs directly in your path, someplace you'll stumble over them in the course of your normal daily operations. And these little applications are a really lightweight way to do just that, eliminating nearly all the friction involved in maintaining and making reference to my lists and reducing the opportunity for fiddling to a minimum.

If GTD is your cup of Rooibos, I highly recommend you take his instructions for a spin.

Thanks, Greg!

—R

Howdy!

Last night's update brought with it some brand new calendar subscription functionality (specially — though not only — for you Google Calendar folk), enhanced printing, fixed Twitter and Jott lookups, and other tweaks and twiddles...

NEW: iCal, gCal, we-all-Cal with iCal

Read all about it at http://gsfn.us/t/axn.

FIXED: Better understanding of "dotty" time ranges

Sandy occasionally finds our human brand of punctuation disconcerting (and who doesn't? ;-) And that's why we are always working with Sandy to ever-more-accurately pick dates and times out of our messages.

To that end, Sandy now fully groks "dotty" time ranges — those chock full of periods or dots like this one: "10 a.m. to 9:45 p.m."

If you're finding Sandy still has trouble with your particular brand of specifying dates and times, please help us help Sandy help you: post the nitty-gritty details here on GetSatisfaction and we'll get it all sorted for you.

ENHANCED: Printing

Earlier this week we rolled out a completely reworked the print stylesheet [Read all about it at http://gsfn.us/t/axx] to produce a nice lovely paper copy of Your stuff or your Daily Digest.

And we just couldn't keep ourselves from enhancing Sandy's printed self still further!

* You'll find a "Print" link to both the Your stuff and Daily Digest (i.e. your iwantsandy.com home page). 1. Click > 2. Print > 3. Fold > 4. Experience increased increased awareness of what your day holds.

* Sandy's full-color beaming countenance has been replaced with a grey-scale (though no less beaming) version to save your printer a drop or three of color.

* The font size was reduced ever so slightly to fit more on a single page, saving you some paper-shuffling and the planet some lovely trees.

* Sandy now includes a reminder about checking in with her at the end of the day so that you can synch up on anything you crossed off the paper copy of your to-do list, added to the calendar, or otherwise would like her to remember for you.

FIXED: Lookups via Twitter and Jott

We inadvertently introduced a bug that caused Sandy (and you) some head-ache around looking things up via Twitter and Jott. This has been rectified and you should now be seeing results returned as expected.

If you are still having trouble for some reason, please do post here and let us know.

TWEAKED: Pagination honors "Include..."

Thanks to the terrific eyesite of Sandy's client "Bluedrums" [http://gsfn.us/t/ay7], we were alerted to and fixed a bug that caused pagination (clicking the "<->" links) to forget any "Include done", "Include archived", and "Include past" toggling you'd done in the right-hand sidebar's advanced filtering and sorting.

FIXED: Replying re-honors preferences

Also introduced during our updates of the other evening was a bug which confused Sandy into replying to email when you'd plainly asked her not to (in your Email settings at http://iwantsandy.com/settings/email). Kudos to Marshall for noticing and fixing the issue all but immediately.

TWEAKED: Line-height of individual items in lists

Individual items were wrapping oddly in some browsers. Thanks, Shawn [http://gsfn.us/t/9ar] for pointing it out!

Onward and upward!

—Rael

Everyone deserves a personal assistant! That's why Sandy makes it simpler-than-pie to introduce her to your friends, family, and co-workers and share appointments, to-dos, and other details just by Cc'ing her.

Some of you have been asking us to bake invitations right into Sandy's web site so that you can see exactly what Sandy will be mailing off to your friends as well as having the chance to include a note of your own.

And that's just what we've done. At the top of any page on Sandy's web site you'll find a brand new "Invite" link that leads to a brand new "Invite a friend" page at http://iwantsandy.com/invite .

* Invite one or many friends all in one go.
* A handy "Add from my address book" wizard gives you easy access to your friends' email addresses, wherever they're stored: AOL, Yahoo!, Outlook, Gmail, Plaxo, Palm, ...
* Because you know your friends better than Sandy does, you can choose an invitation template for Sandy to use.
* Enclose a personal note to your friend(s).
* Anyone you invite is added to your Friends list [http://iwantsandy.com/friends], where you can choose what you would like Sandy to do when when they share something with you.

Give the gift that keeps on reminding!

I have to take a second to really offer my congrats to the Sandy team for creating an incredibly useful product. Although her user community is very vocal about feature requests and glitches, even with her imperfections Sandy has been tremendously helpful. I would love to see more premium features coming along in the future like file storage and retrieval, more control over search results, direct sync of calendar and contact info to other products and services, but this is a service that is immediately of value now and holds much promise for the future.

Cheers!

This is one of two most-requested features that we've thrilled to bring you!

While you can turn email replies [http://iwantsandy.com/settings/email] on and off generally, you can also specify that you'd like Sandy to email a reply -- or not -- to a particular message you send.

@reply

Tag an item with @reply and Sandy will email you a reply even if you have email replies turned off. For example:

> remember to replace the back-porch lightbulb @todo @reply

@noreply

Tag an item with @noreply and Sandy will skip the reply even if you have email replies turned off. For example:

> remember Pride and Prejudice @books @noreply

You'll find updated documentation in the Cheat sheet [http://iwantsandy.com/help/cheatsheet] and Guide book [http://iwantsandy.com/help/guide].

Enjoy!

—Rael

We hope you've been having as much fun twittering with Sandy as we have. And finding it as useful as we are.

Being able to offload a passing thought or set a reminder for something you're sure you'll forget to do sure is a stress-reliever. And doing so without any sort of context switch means being able to let that thought go and stay focused on the task at hand. Whether you're sifting through email, IM'ing with a friend, or boarding a plane, mobile phone in hand, Sandy's never more than a few keystrokes away.

For the past two weeks you've been able twitter "remember this" and "remind me about that" tweets to Sandy, look things up, and receive reminder tweets. Today we've added the ability to update and forget (delete) items too -- just like you're already used to doing by email.

Here's a sample Twitter conversation with Sandy to give you some of the flavor...

> d s remember chris likes french cheese

> [Sandy] #1 I got: chris likes french cheese

> d s update #1 chris likes good french cheese

> [Sandy] #2 I updated: chris likes good french cheese

> d s forget #2

> [Sandy] I forgot: chris likes good french cheese

You can also now snooze reminder tweets, like so:

> [Sandy] #3 Reminder: go for a walk (Wed, 12/19/2007 12:45pm)

> d s remind me in 5 minutes

> [Sandy] #4 I updated: go for a walk (Wed, 12/19/2007 12:45pm)

You'll find far more detail on Sandy's Twitter help page at http://iwantsandy.com/help/twitter.

Or head right on over to Sandy's Twitter settings at http://iwantsandy.com/settings/twitter and start twittering with Sandy.

We hope you find this a useful and natural an addition to Sandy's abilities and look forward to your sharing your experiences with us.

—Rael

(Also posted to http://getsatisfaction.com/iwantsandy... as part of today's push.)

Hello friends of Sandy,

As some of Sandy's more adventurous clients have already noticed*, Sandy's more than aflutter over Twitter [http://twitter.com]. She's ready to chat with you by direct private message from your mobile phone over text/SMS or your desktop via instant messenger (AIM, iChat, Gtalk, and LiveJournal).

Twitter with Sandy by direct private message just as you would any of your other Twitter friends and she'll twitter you back (almost always within a minute).

To get Twitter and Sandy talking, visit your Twitter settings at http://iwantsandy.com/settings/twitter and follow the 4 easy steps to introduce Sandy to your Twitter self.

Essentially, you'll become Twitter friends, mutually following one-another.

Then try:

> d s hi

(In Twitter-speak, this means: "Send Sandy a direct private message saying 'hi'." Note that Sandy's Twitter user name is "S" rather than "Sandy" or "iwantsandy", saving your thumbs some mobile typing.)

Sandy will reply to your tweet with instructions on asking her to remember or remind you about things, look things up, etc.

> Hi, I'm Sandy, your personal assistant.
> Set a reminder: r go for a walk in 15 mins
> Look something up: l today
> Invite a friend: invite pat@example.com
> About me: visit iwantsandy.com
> More examples: visit iwantsandy.com/examples
> Help: visit iwantsandy.com/help/twitter

Right now Sandy will respond to "remember" or "remind" ("r" in even shorter shorthand), "lookup" ("l" as in lower-case "L"), and "invite" ("i"). She'll soon be able to update and forget on Twitter just as she does in email.

****
Don't forget the "d s" bits when twittering to Sandy!** Twitter is a broadcast medium by default, so simply twittering "remember to wear pants" (while an entertaining tweet ;-) will go out to all of your Twitter followers rather than privately to Sandy.
****

You'll find more detail on Sandy's Twitter help page at http://iwantsandy.com/help/twitter

Enjoy!

Rael

* Rich over at Dinsdale! not only noticed that Sandy was paying attention to tweets before we even had a chance to announce this feature ;-), he even wrote up a lovely how-to. [http://dinsdalepiranha.wordpress.com/...]