Welcoming Timeful to Google | Hacker News Reader

Welcoming Timeful to Google

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123 pointsalexbate28 comments

The Timeful team has built an impressive system that helps you organize your life by understanding your schedule, habits and needs. You can tell Timeful you want to exercise three times a week or that you need to call the bank by next Tuesday, and their system will make sure you get it done based on an understanding of both your schedule and your priorities.

I hope this will improve the "Snooze Someday" feature in Inbox, I'm not sure how this is supposed to work now.

I was thinking the same, all round their snooze feature misses edge cases often. It's a solid and smart set of defaults, but it could certainly be improved. For one, if I get an email with a schedule (say a train ticket) I have to go to Gmail then add it to the calendar. It'd be way smoother to just snooze until the day mentioned, and they could presumably use the same stuff Gmail uses to extract calendar events to do so.

BTW I think the idea of the current snooze someday is to save it in snooze instead of done without setting a reminder because it's easier to find stuff there. It's lower friction than using a different app but I doubt it'll scale well to many saved things.

Really I just hope Google have a plan to bring these things together, I think the inbox and Google now reminders are linked, but the keep ones aren't? And Gmail makes calendar events instead, it's all a bit messy.

Regarding your last point Gmail reminds me of train/plane/... events through Google now. It does also create Calendar events. My Keep remainders also pop on Google now, although they seem lower priority (?).

I'm not using Inbox.

Sounds like a cool app, and something I've been looking for. I guess Google ate it so I'll never get to use it. Too bad. Congrats to the people behind the app though.

Been waiting for a Tuneful Android app for months.

Guess I'll never get one. It'll be months I'm sure before some half-assed incomplete features make their way into Google calendar :/

Any info on how Timeful works or their software stack? It sounds like a constraint engine, which (after a term of Prolog 10 years ago) always pique my interest.

Was this an acquihire or is Google sincerely going to integrate these things into Calendar?

If they do, it would be really cool. But Google has also acquired a bunch of other little companies, and it seems like they just digest the teams and have them working on unrelated things.

Not evidence of anything, but I recently got a survey request when using Google Calendar. That's pretty uncommon. So I do wonder if Google is getting interested in the Calendar again, and what they plan to do with it.

I'm not familiar with the purchased company but it almost sounds like they'd want to integrate it more into Google Now than Calendar. Maybe some finer integration of both.

Google has two competing teams working on this kind of thing: the Gmail/Calendar team and the Inbox team. My guess is that the Timeful people will join one of those teams, and whichever one it is gets to integrate these features

From what I have heard, Inbox has been conceived by some of the guys behind Sparrow (another Google's acquisition). There is a good number of simple acqui-hire, but it looks like from time to time, Google also tries to let these people work on their field of expertise.

Hmm, I couldn't really get this app to work well for me, but love that the premise is headed to Google, and hopefully their Calendar.

I do use Google Calendar all the time, and I would LOVE to be able to say, "do this thing sometime in the next couple of days" and have it linger on my calendar somehow - particularly for personal stuff, like "buy a birthday present for so-and-so" or "sign-up the kids for camp next week".

Looking forward to some interesting things here!

I'm building an android app for that in my spare time. Once it's ready, I'm planning to integrate it with Calendar somehow...

The 'Links to this post' section/feature seems to be a clear backlinks scheme. Am I missing something, or is Google condoning link trading, here?

They are rel="nofollow" links. I think that makes it "okay" in the eyes of Google, but not certain.

I've yet to see a primary source where Google clearly state that they don't mind what you do with nofollow links. It's clear that Google was originally ignoring them, but some of their policies around comment spam and such do suggest that they could pass along negative value to the sites being linked. It's just not clear what circumstances trigger that.

I really hate it when a large company acquires a small successful company.

It usually means that a totally generic solution is tied to a single product.

Maybe I missed it but what is the current fate of Timeful? Shut down or sunsetting?

Looks like they are sunsetting. They will be focusing on other projects at google

Sunsetting?! Did they all live in Finland in the middle of winter? It was a bloody short day.

I was a user of Timeful. It live[s|d] on my dock. The thing has only been around for what feels like 6 months ... so much for that. So much for altering your workflow to get used to a new service. So much for relying on something.

I don't recall if I paid for it, and thus have any right to be even slightly miffed, or if - more likely - it was free, and I should therefore just shut up and get on with my life.

When will this ever stop? It really makes me reticent to "trust" a new app, ever again.

It was free, if it makes you feel any better.

I used it too, but it always felt like a good idea not yet fully executed.

From an email that was sent to all Timeful accounts:

    A couple things to note:
    
    * Timeful will remain in the App Store, and
    we'll continue to support it. We won't be
    adding new features, but we're more than
    happy to help you with bugs or answer any
    questions you have.
    * If you'd like, you can export your data
    out of Timeful (http://www2.timeful.com/export/)
    at any time.

I have got to say, that looks like the right way to handle such an acquisition.

I hope the buy a task/todo company soon. Tasks is terrible.

I guess they have Google Keep for that use-case now, so perhaps it's unlikely? The Keep task list feature there is decent, with checkable items that automatically go to the bottom when done, the ability to set time or location based reminders, and sharing with others.

Still, it's a bit of a pain that it's embedded in a more general app - for me, that means it can be a bit hard to find my task lists among other notes or photos.

The gmail task applet wasn't great (usable, but barely). It's a real pity Google can't just get this right, because it's exactly the kind of basic functionality that you don't want to have another login/provider for, and want good mobile / web / cloud syncing for.

What's up with buying though. Why can't their teams come out with new features themselves.

Domain knowledge is expensive. Might as well buy a hand full of devs with the domain knowledge already in place.

Timeful was a TODO/task company, they just approached the problem in a different way, by arguing that the calendar and the TODO list should be the same app, not separate apps.

The idea was to have a TODO list with actual time committments associated, and you had the ability to actually schedule your TODO by slotting them into your calendar.

Functionally, it was a great idea, but it suffered greatly from a lack of integration with most other tools on the market. If Google runs with it, it could be interesting, hopefully they actually do something with the idea.

> the calendar and the TODO list should be the same app

Sounds similar the functionality that MS Outlook Windows application offers. Though, I would like to have it on Android & iOS too and with IMAP support.

I hope they consolidate keep and tasks into a single product. It is not a bad thing to try to different competing approaches (inbox vs gmail), but Google does tend to do that a lot.

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