Webware

MyPunchbowl has a new service for remembering people's birthdays.

Designed to keep you from forgetting when it's somebody's special day, you can set up reminders that can be sent to both you and your friends. To do this, the service has employed a system that pesters your friends to add themselves to your personal database. In the process, the hope is that they'll join the system too.

Right now you can do this via e-mail, IM, Twitter, and Facebook. In all cases, it sends out a quick mm/dd/yyyy request to your contacts, along with the option for them to hide the year they were born. There's also the incentive for them to sign up, since when they're done putting in their birthday, it tells them when yours is, and gives them the option to squirrel it away by signing up themselves. Once they've done this, it's added to your database where you can filter them down into special groups like friends, family, college buddies, etc.

My one major beef with this service is that if you're trying to get birthday information from your friends on Facebook, it's likely already there. There are also a handful of apps within Facebook that offer this same functionality. Also, since November, Facebook has had its own weekly reminder service that you can sign up for that tells you whose birthdays are coming up. For that reason, MyPunchbowl's service ends up being a better solution for Twitter, although I'll be honest here--I don't care about the people I'm following on Twitter as much as I do about the friends and family I'm connected to on Facebook.

Where the system holds real value is that it's deeply tied into MyPunchbowl's other services. For instance, if it's someone you were never intending to get a gift or a real card for, you can simply use MyPunchbowl's eCard service and send it to them using the information you've already gathered. By contrast, you can also turn around and begin planning a party right away using the built-in tools. For that, there's some real value, which is what makes it worthwhile if you're already using the service to do the party planning. If not, you may be better off using a Facebook app like Birthday Exporter to take that birthday data to a calendar service you're already using.

MyPunchbowl lets you quickly add people's birthdays, either manually or by sending out requests via e-mail.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

When you want to send out a blast to your friends to get their birthdates you can do it via e-mail, or through Facebook and Twitter. There's also a link you can send through e-mail that will get them to the entry page.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Trying to get work done is tough if you have an Internet connection. The constant urge to take a peek at a video on YouTube or check your personal e-mail is a siren song that for many simply cannot be ignored. Luckily, there are several sites and browser add-ons that can help keep us in line, be it with basic productivity or making sure we do not stumble in moments of weakness.

Gmail "e-mail goggles" and "take a break" labs add-ons

Don't drink and e-mail.

Want to send that e-mail at 4 a.m.? Unless you're up early, and getting a jump start on the work day, Google's Gmail thinks you're drunk and will wisely make you do the math problems to prove you're not. Of course, if you really want to outsmart the machine you can simply turn this Gmail labs add-on off from the settings menu, which requires no math whatsoever.

Likewise, the "take a break" labs add-on can make you stop whatever work you're doing to go enjoy the finer things in life. It keeps tabs on how long you've been working in Gmail and will give you a pop-up that requires doing something else for 15 minutes before coming back to your in-box. This is recommended if you don't want to install one of those ergonomic nag programs on your machine.

E-mail discipline

E-mail discipline bars you from using certain sites until you get work done.

(Credit: Mozilla)

Want to hop on Facebook or check your personal e-mail for a little while while drudging away at work? You'll need to earn it with E-mail discipline. This Firefox add-on keeps you from visiting nearly 20 different sites including MySpace, YouTube, and Twitter without doing a little bit of work between sessions. As long as you ignore these places for two hours at a time it lets you browse for a short while, before putting up a nag screen that tells you to get back to it. Users are able to override the nag screens at any time by clicking the "cheat" button.

Procrastato

Like E-mail discipline, Firefox add-on Procrastato works off a blacklist of sites you probably shouldn't be visiting. Once you're on one of these sites (which you add in manually) it starts a timer in the background. If you're there past your allotted amount it gives you a pop-up message telling you to get back to work.

MeeTimer

If pop-up nags aren't your thing, and you don't feel like being scolded for bad online behavior, worth checking out is MeeTimer. Once installed it simply keeps tabs on how long you're spending on each site and breaks it up into percentages--including how much of that was done during "work" time. Consider it the browser equivalent of parental guilt trip. It's not mad at you, just disappointed that you spend 29 percent of your working day on Facebook.

See how your daily browsing is broken down with MeeTimer. You might be shocked.

(Credit: Mozilla)

HassleMe

If you want the nagging features of Google or Yahoo calendar with some level of anonymity there's always HassleMe. The site will send you a friendly reminder e-mail to do something, be it to take out the trash, reply to a certain e-mail, or finish a project. You get to pick how often it sends these messages, and it promises to change up the times ever so slightly so you cannot anticipate when it will arrive.

ReminderFox

If clogging up your e-mail in-box with reminders sounds less than desirable, check out ReminderFox. This Firefox add-on puts a to-do list on the side of your browser. You can set deadlines for each task, along with reminders that will pop up, and can be acknowledged, ignored, or delayed, just like in Microsoft Outlook.

LeechBlock

Along the lines of MeeTimer and Email Discipline, LeechBlock lets you organize sites you probably shouldn't be going to in sets. You can prioritize each set, and block yourself out of using them down to certain times of day, or how much time you've already spent using them. Consider this something similar to the parental settings on a TV, keeping you from accessing content you shouldn't be looking at when you're supposed to be working.

Any we missed? Leave them in the comments.

If you're wary of using silly things like calendars to keep track of to-dos and reminders, Resnooze is worth checking out. This tool lets you schedule in weekly, daily, and monthly reminders to do something. Every time you get said reminders delivered to your in-box there are three simple options to get rid of it, or be reminded yet again--either a week or month from then.

Used reminders are set up in a small queue where you can tweak their frequency or get rid of them entirely. What's nice is that it will automatically register you for an account the first time you make a reminder, making it easy to come back later to add and remove planned reminders.

For now, Resnooze is limited to e-mail nags, so if you're looking for a more intrusive solution you might want to use Google or Yahoo's calendar tools, both of which include mobile SMS and instant-messaging reminders, although neither has the option to "snooze" a reminder for a later date.

[via Kim Komando and Delicious]

To set reminders, you just drop in what you want to remember and at what frequency. Once it's been made, you can go back in and edit the dates.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Outlook alerts have regularly saved my professional career. I also use a scheduled alert to wake me up in the morning that's successful as long as I change it up every few weeks. Some people need a little more though, which is where a service like the freshly launched Alerts.com could be a life saver.

Alerts lets you set up your e-mail, home and mobile phones to get alerts for just about anything. Some of the more useful ones include weather and gas prices, but there are entertainment ones as well, like the horoscopes and daily tidbits which are essentially factoids. You can go in and tweak which ones you want to receive, and with what velocity throughout the day. The service also has a scheduler to keep you from receiving alerts at certain times during the day and week, along with an away mode that can be toggled remotely to stop all messages entirely.

There are currently just 10 alerts to choose from, but there are many more coming in the near future like one that pulls in RSS feeds and another for watching the prices of goods you're tracking online. All of them are partnered with other sites to provide the data, like the job hunting widget which will hunt down jobs for you based on keywords and geographical proximity using a database from Jobster. Developers can also build their own alerts with an API that plugs into the site's architecture. To make money off this, small ads are tacked on to the end of messages as space allows--a business model I don't think works very well when you're trying to squeeze news into 140 characters to begin with.

Competing services include Yahoo Alerts, Google Alerts, 4Info, and the now defunct Down2Nite.

Pick from a shortlist of alerts you can set up to get e-mailed or sent to your phone as a text message with Alerts.com.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Aide-memoire service ReQall, which I first tested a year ago, is getting a 2.0 update. New features will make this clever application more useful. Now, when you type or speak an item to remember, you can also help ReQall file it away for you by using certain keywords. For example, if you say, "Buy milk," the service will put that to-do on your "shopping list." The service also understands time: You can specify items for "tomorrow" or for specific dates. You can also share items by saying, for example, "Ask Joe to look into Megacorp." It helps if Joe then has a ReQall account; if he does, the item will appear in both your lists. (See also: BaseCamp.)

There are other to-do list products (such as RememberTheMilk) and even others that parse English (IWantSandy). What makes ReQall different is that it allows multiple inputs--not just text--and outputs for your lists. You can speak your items to the ReQall phone number, put them on the Web site or widget, or connect via text message or instant message (that's new). The service acts as both a storehouse for your items and as a reminder service. It will remind you via an IM or e-mail on items you need to remember. There's also a pretty new iPhone interface.

ReQall makes it easy to keep daily reminder lists.

In my test of the beta, I found ReQall 2.0 easy to use but limited in its understanding of English. You have to know what keywords will set off its automatic categorizing and time-slotting. For example, when I entered the text, "Remind me in 10 minutes to prep" it did not seem to recognize what I was asking for.

There's another new feature with unrealized potential: Photographic Memory. You can now send pictures to your account from a Picasa Web account. That's kind of cool, but it'd be more useful, I think, if you could send camera-phone images to your account. For example, if you had a nice bottle of wine at a restaurant that you wanted to add to your shopping list, it'd be useful if you could record it via photo. The upcoming Evernote version may allow you to do just that, and with OCR of the label to boot.

ReQall's sexiest feature is still its speech-to-text capability. You call up the ReQall service and speak your reminder, and it adds it to your flow of notes. I'm still a bit freaked out that the service is human-assisted: If the automated speech-to-text engine doesn't work perfectly, someone might listen to your recording to transcribe it to your account. ReQall's Sunil Vemuri assures me that the transcribers don't get user account information alongside the audio they work with. However, you'd still be wise to remember that actual people might be hearing your words, and that clearly illegal voice notes will bubble up and get attention you don't want.

There's still no visible monetization scheme for ReQall. In the future, premium accounts may get more access to voice transcription services.

I really like all the super-clean, super-simple reminder products like ReQall--in theory. I have yet to adopt one, being a slave to my own hack of a method that involves index cards and OneNote. None of the services I've used so far blend both the quick-and-dirty, access-from-anywhere reminder service we all need, with a good system for recording long-form notes. Evernote may do that, but it's still in closed beta. We'll have a look at it shortly.

It happens all the time. You're out somewhere and hear a good song on the radio, or want to jot down a book, movie or TV show you want to look up later. While many phones have built in voice note applications, the information you just (painstakingly) jotted down stays on the phone, and you might just forget about it. A company called Kwiry (like "query") is attempting to help you out with a new service that turns a brief text message into a full blown Web search that you can come back to when you're near a computer. Think of it like Twitter, but with a dash of Remember The Milk and Google.

The service cross checks each item that's been sent its way over a variety of search engines, including ones like Yelp, Yahoo Shopping, Google Maps, and iTunes to help you sniff out restaurants, products, addresses, and music albums. It's how the service intends to make its money, not only by using things like affiliate links, but also inserting sponsored advertising alongside the regular search results.

Keep track of your own Kwirys, or those of your friends on one big page. You can also just grab the RSS feed and check it out in your favorite reader.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Just like Twitter, messages sent to Kwiry show up on a personal feed with a simple URL you can share with friends. To toggle a sent message as private, you can give each message a letter prefix by typing "p" in front of it. These will show up alongside the rest of your Kwiry messages, although they'll be denoted with a little private emblem that makes them easy to sort through. You can also set it up so just your friends will see your posts either as a default, or by using a yet another letter prefix in front of your message.

Like any good communication platform Kwiry's got a lot going for it with regards to integration with other social services. There are little modules for Netvibes, iGoogle, Pageflakes, and others, along with a Facebook app that links up with your Kwiry account to show off your latest queried items--although oddly missing is a way to send one from the app (which admittedly is kind of useless if you're on a computer in the first place). Twitter fans are also in luck, as you can simply add Kwiry's Twitter bot as a friend, and send it direct messages that accept the same privacy settings.

The one thing this service is missing is some visual style. I'm not saying it's ugly, but compared to entrances from other micropublishing services like Jaiku, Twitter, and Pownce, Kwiry falls a little on the plain side. The positive to that is that it's super fast, easy, and intuitive, which on the whole is far more important than looks alone. I've added it to my contact list for the time being, although it's worth noting that if your phone's got a data plan, you can probably continue to be selfish antisocial and look things up without sharing them with others.