Hiveminder. Now available with a lovely chatty IM interface

We're working on some fun new Hiveminder features. More than a few of them are going to end up as 'pro' features. That means we'll charge you a few bucks every month to use them. There's one new feature I'm not willing to restrict to paid users. That's our new instant messaging interface to Hiveminder. Right now our little robot, 'HMTasks' is only hanging out on AOL Instant Messenger, though we're currently trying to convince him that he'd like to chat with you on Yahoo, Jabber and Google Talk.

HMTasks is a bit friendlier than our command line interface though just as speedy. And you can talk to the bot anywhere you have an AIM client.

I've been using the bot for the past couple weeks. There are still a few rough edges, but it's definitely ready to invite some of you to play with it. There's plenty of online help, but you can get a lot done using create to make new tasks todo to get a list of your current tasks and done when you've finished something. My absolute favorite bit of the whole interaction is review. Task review is a lot friendlier when it's a conversation (even if it is a conversation with a machine ;). If you're bored and have a few minutes to kill, random will pick something off your todo list that you should take care of.

It only takes a moment to set up HMTasks. Start by setting up your IM preferences.

As with everything else we do, there's a nice easy feedback command. Tell us what you love about working with your tasks by IM. (We'd also be happy to hear about what could use a bit of work.)

Comments

[nick]

That's hot. I've been using it all afternoon, and the IM integration really fits into my workflow seamlessly.

I started using HM a few weeks ago both because of the great features it has, and because it seemed that development was both rapid and helpful. Glad to see I wasn't wrong. Keep up the good work!

[Graham Freeman]

Sounds great! I'll try it out as soon as the Jabber interface works. (AOL and I haven't been on speaking terms since 1994.)

[Jake McKee]

IM is cool, but I've gotten addicted to Mac OS Dashboard Widgets - does one exist? If not, are there plans for one?

[Jesse]

Jake,

We'd be thrilled to help with the backend for a dashboard widget, but we don't have a lot of the knowledge in-house. Would you be interested in taking a stab at the frontend?

-jesse

[Oscar]

This is awesome. I use the instant message feature all the time. It makes reviewing tasks so much faster than anything I've tried. You could even run this in a meeting for a department if you manage your tasks with HM. It just keeps getting better and better.

[Kirill]

Can you advise what jabber daemon/API are you using for IM integration? :)
We also develop some kind of web service with Perl/PHP, and trying to find the flexible way to handle IM.
Looking at ejabberd (which is used for http://www.chatterous.com/ss08/ as example) and it seems it requires learning of erlang. Re Djabberd not sure it works stable as server-type....
Please advise.

[Jesse]

Kirill,

We're using djabberd and have been pretty impressed. Don't forget that it was designed as a jabber server for Livejournal.