Earlier this year I blogged about using the twitter bot for Remember the Milk. I still use it fairly well, even though the SMS messages from the RTM come late a bit. It’s working for me in order to get a good chain going for the thesis proposal. There are a couple other bots that I’m using which are on twitter as well.

The first bot that I use is the bot at timer. The timer bot will let you set a timer (surprisingly). You only need to send it a direct message with the amount of minutes as well as a reminder for you about what it was set for. For example, if you want to remember to plug the meter before it runs out in 40 minutes, just twitter ‘d timer 38 plug the meter’ to timer and in 38 minutes it will inform you that your timer is up. You can have multiple timers running at once, which is useful if you are perhaps having tea at a coffee shop while you are parked on the street.

Another bot I use is the gcal. Gcal is a connection to your google calendar through twitter. You can set up new appointments by messaging the gcal bot with something like ‘d gcal Pick up joe at 7pm’ or ‘d gcal set up web application for judy tomorrow’ and it will add it to your calendar. I use it in the morning to track my weight. I just pull out my phone while I am at the scale and SMS ‘d gcal my weight is XXX’, and it adds the event as a day event on the day it was sent.

The last bot I will go over today is the mymm bot. It is slightly more complicated but still useful. When you’re at the pump, you can direct message mymm a little info and get back the MPG that you have done since the last fillup. It helps me keep a tab on how good or bad I’m driving, which is a good thing. The car we drive usually gets about 24 MPG, but I learned through this that when I’m carrying a bunch of crap in the back, the MPG drops 3-4, so it’s better for me to have an empty trunk.

I’m sure there are a bunch of other useful bots out there (ququoo is one, which I may cover in another post), but these are the most useful that I’ve found so far. Twitter is turning out to be much more useful than just random status updates.