February 15, 2007

Notes, Reminders, Todo's and many more within Instant Messengers with IMified

Opening a browser window for our simple online tasks is annoying at times. For regular surfing it is unavoidable to open browser window. For some of the web services like Notes, reminders and todo lists, we have alternate options now. IMified is a new web 2.0 service that offers these services within the IM networks. The IM networks that you can use this service includes GTalk, Yahoo, MSN and AIM.

[Note: MSN association is temporarily down at the time of this writing.]

It offers more than the three above mentioned services. It helps us post entries in Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad and LiveJournal blogs. Another service that many may find useful is the ability to access Google Calendar from IM window.

I personally don't like to give my login credentials to IMified folks (or to any other third party site for that matter). It is up to you to decide.

OK, here is how it works:

Just add 'imified' in your IM network. As you may know already, you may need to suffix '@gmail.com' for GTalk.

After adding the ID, just send a message to it. It will reply with the options. Here is a sample screenshot in GTalk:

Its self-explanatory. Easy to work with.

Some of the notable points:
  • Multiple account integration is not possible yet.
  • Signing up to this service may be the simplest sign up methods available till date. Just add the ID to your IM network. Thats it.
  • The folks at IMified are very friendly. Catch all the development actions at their blog here
  • Shortcuts are great way to simplify our regular tasks. For example, you can set a shortcut like '/vn' to view notes which you otherwise would have reached by pressing 'M', 'Enter', '1', 'Enter', '2' and 'Enter'.

I am using it regularly now.

Update [15th Feb 2007]:

MSN will not be associated with IMefied. This is what the blog post says:

This one is killing us. After a week of back and forth emails with Microsoft trying to get our screen name to appear online to more than 1000 users at a time, we’ve been told no. The limit with MSN occurs when over 1000 screen names request presence for our screen name at any given time, meaning that if your not one of the lucky 1000, our screen name will appear offline to existing users and new users cannot be added to our buddy list.

Now, we certainly understand that MSN has policies in place that need to be adhered to, but AOL contacted us on day one to proactively offer a solution for a possible issue on their network and things have been running fine on AIM as well as Yahoo and Gtalk. The only option we were given was to build our service on their SDK and then and only then would they lift the limit on our screen name.

So, unfortunately there are a lot of MSN users out there who will not be able to access IMified. We regret this but tried to do everything we could to rectify the situation. If you think this sucks as much as we do, send an email over to: bizdesk@microsoft.com and tell them you want your IMified.


Lets mail MSN folks and get our IMified a lift.


Technorati Tags: IMified, Instant Messenger