As time goes on twitter is becoming a more useful service than just a micro blogging platform. Today I discovered that you can set reminders using “timer”.

Now timer is a user on twitter, but don’t try and start a conversation with it. I say “it” because timer is a twitter bot, a bot with a purpose. That purpose is to send you or anyone else that adds it as a friend reminders. Great idea.

The process is very simple, you obviously need a twitter account.

1. Add timer as a friend
2. Send timer a direct message*
3. Make the message this format:[number of minutes] [your message]
4. timer will send you a reminder in the number of minutes you have stated in your message

For example, say you want be reminded to ring a friend back in 10 minutes:

10 Ring Tim Back

That is if you use the direct message interface on twitter.

* If you are using SMS or something like Twitterific (not sure about tweetr or other clients, but it should work the same way) or the web interface; you need to change the format a bit, don’t worry it is easy. Just add: d timer before the minutes and message. So using the above example your message would look like this:

d timer 10 Ring Tim Back

There is more info about direct messages from the twitter help. For more on timer take a look at the timer instructions page.

Pretty cool idea I thought. Apparently there can be small delays so don’t use it to time something really precisely, like hair removal cream… but it is usually only out by a minute or so.

There are also more twitter bots out there, retweet has a great list of them and instructions on how to use them. There is even one that is tweeting a book, one line at a time, every 15 minutes. It is going to take eight months to read the book! It is great to see twitter becoming more than a micro blog.

Dave

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 31st, 2007 at 11:49 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.