Your Own Personal Assistant
Two topics fueling the cocktail circuit these days are shortage of time and failure of memory. While there’s more to help us achieve the achievable than ever before, there isn’t enough time to do it in. Same with brain power. Did we drink away all those vibrant brain cells in college which now has us gulping huge doses of herbs or working on mental exercises designed to retain what little we have left? Whatever the case, technology to the rescue and so impressively indispensable it is, you’ll wonder how you’ve lived so long without her — Sandy. Your very own fully automated personal assistant. So reliable is Sandy, she’ll tell you where you left your keys and do it without attitude.
IWantSandy is an email-based automated personal assistant that has just opened up for public signups. According to Cory Doctorow of boingboing who has been using “Sandy” for a couple months now, he swears she’s fast becoming indispensable to his life. [I cobbled together my own image of Sandy taken from ffffound identifying the above couple as a telemarketer and his wife].
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 cough up all your reminders 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.
Sandy’s a real Boing Boing-pal effort. It was invented by Rael Dornfest, the former CTO of O’Reilly Media, who (among other things) created the open-source blogging tool Blosxom and chaired the O’Reilly P2P and Emerging Tech conferences. Sandy herself is based on Tim O’Reilly’s stellar personal assistant, also named Sandy. And bonus — the little Sandy logo was designed by our own Mark Frauenfelder! The functionality in IWantSandy is really geared to personal-productivity freaks like me, who were inspired by books like Getting Things Done and the Life Hacks movement.
