kevin1's dashboard

Yes, ReQall will send multiple texts.

Unfortunately, it is limited to only one shopping list. RTM is superior in this respect. However, if all you need is the one, ReQuall is much easier and faster to set up than RTM/Twitter.

Personally, after Jott and Sandy (both of which I love dearly), I was just exhausted with setting up and learning new systems and so I liked ReQuall because it met my needs without any tweaking and no learning curve. However, GTD followers and others who rely extensively on multiple lists would greatly benefit from the RTM/Twitter combo!

Yeraze,

Combining Remember the Milk/Twitter, a person can use their cell phone to direct message Remember the Milk on Twitter, and RTM sends a particular list from one's RTM account (you have to add RTM as a friend on your Twitter account, and RTM on Twitter has to know what RTM.com account you have, but you get the picture.) If the characters in the text message exceed Twitter's limit, RTM just sends multiple text messages until the message is complete.

I don't have experience with ReQall yet, but I'd imagine this is how it would work there too.

Complete replies via SMS is tricky because SMS (like twitter) has a very restrictive character limit.

How was ReQall accomplish it? Multiple text messages?

I LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE Sandy and use it extensively in through Jott. That said, there is a free outside source solution. I use reQall specifically, and only, for SMS access to my shopping list.

"With reQall’s organizing and sharing capabilities, the family shopping has never been easier. Because reQall recognizes key words like "buy," it can put those items right on your shopping list.

Enter “buy milk” and reQall knows to put it on your shopping list.
Want to share the shopping with your spouse? Just enter, “Tell John to buy shoes for the kids,” and it will go on his shopping list.

Even better, this memory tool connects it all! So you never have to stand in the middle of the grocery store and realize “My shopping list is on the frig!” Just call reQall on your cell phone and have reQall play your shopping list or even better, send it to you in a text message. "

Complete lookup replies via SMS is really a must. Please, please, please!?

Any update on this, yet? Has development on a Sandy IM interface started yet? :)

It`s cool, but what about multiple cyrillic tags? – konstak, on August 26, 2008 04:56

I thought I'd post Rael's response to the problem I was having (Rael is a Sandy rep). Apparently tags starting with a number will not be interpreted as tags (which explains kevin1's post above).

I still think that numbers are a simple way to prioritize a task, and it's more of a pain to use the tags "@high" or "@medium" instead of "@1" or "@2" (see below).

Honestly I haven't used Sandy in a while (in favor of Remember the Milk's more robust interface), but I might give Sandy another shot.

Faisal

Hi Faisal,

Sorry you ran into this!

We were occasionally having some issues with folks using # instead of
@ for tagging and — when used in combination with numbers (ex. #1 or
#2), Sandy was becoming confused thinking they were trying to refer to
a numbered item.

So in order to support (rather than simply reject) # as an alternative
to @ and also fix the issues around folks using #1 when they meant @1,
we had Sandy only start recognizing tags starting with a letter
(rather than a letter or a number).

While we always try to make sure that any changes we make don't
adversely affect folks like yourself, we appear to have missed your
usage pattern in the shuffle.

What I'd suggest is using @low, @medium, @high, etc from here on out
(or a similar alternative). If this really is a source of trouble for
you, I can certainly dig in a little deeper to see what we might be
able to do to accommodate your @1, @2 usage.

Best,

Rael

The problems involving tags like @1 and @2 comes from a recent change where sandy now recognizes tags starting with # as well as @. This means she now has a bit of difficulty distinguishing when you're trying to tag something @1 versus trying to change item #1 in a result.

Great idea mdy. I'll definitely use that in the future.

Good point. I often use Google site search because our search admittedly still needs some work. – Eric Suesz, on August 25, 2008 15:44

While this feature is still not available in GSFN, I thought I'd share with you the work-around that I've been using in the meantime.

Google seems to actively search and index GSFN (though not in real-time), so I usually use Google's site-specific search to look for old replies.

The search parameter is "site:[partial or full URL] [keywords]" where:

a. "site" - tells Google to restrict search results to only web pages that start with the URL you specified

b. "keywords" - can be any combination of keywords that you're searching for.

So, here's an example of a search for all replies made by kevin1:
Click to see search results.

The search results can be narrowed further by specifying additional keywords.

Since Google's indexing of this site isn't real-time, the newer replies usually don't appear in the search results. But if I'm interested in newer replies, I usually just page through a person's dashboard. I really just use this when I want to find older replies.

Hey Kevin, thanks for your reply, you also make some great additional points! :)
Especially the second paragraph.

But I don't agree with you on the third paragraph. As both described by me and partly by yourself, the problem with this is, it isn't exactly the solution for finding a specific answer! Even if one might only marked only a few answers, but what if not??

I think, in General one could integrate this though, so this would drift more into the direction of a kind of diigo / delicious / social sharing thing! Because, yeah, maybe I'd be interested in what you think are the best points, although I'm not interested in your "saved for later" items, as they are too (!) specific for me! I think that would be realistic. Because although sharing of "favorites" seems to be a good option at first sight, if you name it "saved for later reference", the appeal of it quickly fades!

And concerning your question: I don't know a way to display "tag events" (?), when you mean "marked as useful / as one of the best points"! I think this is still missing.

And concerning tags, yes, I think also the team here is conscious about the fact, that the tag system isn't enough for (and also not made for!) finding specific replies. But I think the tag system is great and useful in itself for tracking certain keywords. The only thing one would have to improve long-term, is the tag quality & consistency.

I was also thinking right after signing up to IWS "Why no ISO date format?". It is the most common date format today and ignores country specifics.

Thanks for the clarification konstak.

Hopefully the iwantsandy people will pay attention and fix the problem they introduced. Where tags can't use non-alpha characters. (Both numbers and Cyrillic characters.)

Phillip makes a good point. The way I think of it, his idea is another way of allowing people to "tag" replies. Users would be able to mark individual replies as a "favorite" or somehow add it to a list ("favorites" or "saved for later").

This favorites list could be private, or it could be viewable by others. Either way, it would be linked to a particular person. Everybody would have their own list of favorites. I guess it would be possible for the reply to be visibly marked, something like (77 people have added this reply to their favorites).

Now that I think about it, the tagging system already works this way. All tags are linked to a particular person. That means that every user has a set of replies that they tagged as "answers the question". This set just isn't viewable as an individual list. The profile page has a list of "recent activity". This contains all kinds of things. Including events such as "You marked one of Philipp's replies as useful." How can I get a list of only tag events? Can I filter the "recent activity" list to only display tag events?

The idea of tagging replies is good, but I view it as an incomplete solution for my problem. It should be easier to implement than a full search, and it certainly is useful in it's own right, but it still wouldn't solve every problem I was thinking of. I still wouldn't be able to search through my list of favorites for replies containing specific keywords. Nor would I be able to search through all the replies made by a particular person.