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Enhanced Instant Messaging with IMSmarter
Zanek writes "Engadget has an article about David Weekly who has created IMsmarter. What is IMSmarter? David describes it as a 'secretary that helps you out by sitting between you and the rest of the world, letting you know about things that are interesting and taking notes'. Works on all computers, no software to install." Gaim and other clients have good logging and search capabilities, but this goes a few steps beyond that.
RTFA...IMSmarter is free too.
Finally an article I can post on! :) We host IMSmarter's many servers (yay, another Slashdotting for Simpli!) and David is a personal friend of mine. I've been using his service for a few weeks and I can offer you my feedback.
First, the thing about IMSmarter is not what it can do right now, but the platform it's enabling for the future. David has been working hard for the past year developing the backend things; it's just in the past month that he's really started to turn his focus to adding features. Some of the things he's been chewing on include:
1) To-do lists. These are mostly implemented now and are mentioned in the article. They are basically reminders without the cumbersome Outlook interface. "Remind me in 20 minutes to call my friend," you type to the proxy, and it dutifully does so. No more setting up calendar appointments for simple things.
2) Logging (and yes, for the paranoid out there, you can turn this off.) This is actually pretty useful as the logs are stored on a central server. I can't tell you how many times I've logged into my PC from home just to dig through chat logs; now I don't have to.
3) Website updates. This is the one I've been bugging David about. The service will automatically notify your friends when you update your personal website. I can't wait to use this one for my blog.
4) Fedex/UPS tracking. Notifies you when a package you've shipped has arrived, for instance.
Basically, David's vision for this (as I understand it) is to get rid of those hundreds of annoying emails we all get saying "Someone has replied to a thread you posted in" or "Your package has been shipped" or "XYZ updated his blog today." Those are things for which email is not as useful as IM is.
Knowing how motivated David is in this venture, I know we'll see great things from IMSmarter. It still needs maturation -- right now, the platform is there to build on, but not too many implementations have been built. He needs beta testers, and beta testing is pretty simple (you just set up a proxy on your IM client and sign up through their website.) Check it out and mark this one down as "one to watch."
-Erica
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From the privacy policy
2.2 Signing Up for IM Smarter
Basic Subscription: When you register for IM Smarter, we ask for your name, IM clients used, ZIP code, and age. All of these are required in order for our service to function properly. Basic Subscriptions are paid for by targeted advertising. Thus, as a Basic subscriber, we may also ask you about your interests from time to time, to help our sponsors select advertisements most appropriate to your interests.
nope:
http://gaim-encryption.sourceforge.net/
We even run this at work within my group to keep our conversations out of the hands of those pesky sametime admins.
It's not software, it's a settings file. You should know the difference. Do you consider it downloading software if your pop email server changes and you have to change a setting in firebird/outlook/whatever?
IMSmarter works by acting as a SOCKS4 server, so every packet from your IM client (AIM in your case) goes to their server first.
They offer that auto-config for people who aren't smart enough to find the connection options dialog and change it themselves.