aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Saturday, November 24, 2007

I Want Sandy

I just signed up for I Want Sandy.

Cory Doctorow, who’s “proud to serve on the advisory board for values of n, the company that produces I Want Sandy,” says:

IWantSandy is an email-based automated personal assistant that has just opened up for public signups. I’ve been using Sandy for a couple months now, and she’s fast becoming indispensable for my life. All you do is CC your personal Sandy address on your mail and throw in keywords, like “Sandy, remember that this is the grocery list” or “Sandy, remind me to follow up on this with Fred on January 1, 2008” and the Sandybot will file away all your minutae for you. Sandy emails you with reminders (she can also communicate by Twitter/SMS). She can barf up all your remembers whenever you need them—just tag your emails with the @-mark (for example @phonenumber @kids @kitchenrenovation @welding) and then ask her for all the items corresponding to a given tag.

The coolest thing about I Want Sandy is the “groupware” function—if I CC you and Sandy on a message with a reminder, she’ll remind both of us. No permissions, no groups, just CC in regular email. The service is free and live and open to all comers.

Matt Wood adds:

You can also email Sandy commands to lookup stuff and send it back to you, very handy if you’re on the move with an iPhone or Blackberry, or, you can always manage all your stuff on Sandy’s website.

Sandy also supports recurring events and tags, so GTD users could easily turn it into a nice, trusted system with mucho lists and contexts.