Library clips

IM is so handy as it sits in your systems tray and you can communicate in an easy click, without needing a browser.
This ease of use has induced IM as a more versatile tool than just chatting, many services are building upon it for other uses:

eg. RSS to IM (ZapTxt, Rasasa) , IM to RSS (Sabifoo), Twitter, IM search (byoms)

It didn’t take long for the service IMified to see how handy IM can be and develop a whole product to enable it to be used with many services…basically control your apps via IM.

IMfied has 3 inbuilt apps: notes, reminders, and todo…but of course the beauty of it is that you can choose from a selection of other services, even post to your blog (can’t wait for this choice of services to grow).
As mentioned, services like Twitter have enabled this feature themselves, but the idea of IMified is to IMifiy other services that don’t provide the feature themselves.

How it works

Like Twitter and the way Gubb works with email you can use it to not only send, but to also receive.
NOTE: I wonder if IMified will add Gubb to its service list.

Joining IMified was the most unique way I have registered for a service, firstly I added imified@gmail.com as a contact in my Gtalk, then I sent a message to this contact eg. I’d love to join IMified.

Straight away I was returned a message that I successfully joined, it said type “help” for help, type “m” for menu.
It said select “My Account” from the list below to access services, so I just IM’d “4″ (without the quotation marks) and I was returned my account settings.

The menu is:

*** Main Menu ****
1 - IMified Notes
2 - IMified Reminders
3 - IMified Todos
4 - My Account

This message contained some links to the IMified website where I could check out my profile and add more services to my account.
So from the website I added another IMified Notes, I was instantly IM’d saying to IM the character “m” to refresh the menu, then I was instantly IM’d my updated menu which displays 5 choices, due to the new notes channel I just created.

I though I’d try this out, I IM’d “1″, and it IM’d back:

*** IMified Notes ***
1 - Add
2 - View

So I IM’d “1″, it then IM’d back:

Enter new note:

So I IM’d:

this is my first note

It IM’d back saying note has been added.

Then I IM’d “2″ to view items within this notes channel, and it IM’d back my note…awesome.
It also mentioned that I could delete a note/s by IM’g the number of the note or “ALL” to delete all items.

Another feature is “shortcuts“, this basically gives you a quicker path to add or view.
From the website, I added a shortcut called “na” and chose the service “IMified notes” and chose the action “add”.

Now when I want to add a note I just type in “na” followed by my note, eg. na this is my new note

I also made a shortcut “nv” for viewing my notes.

Feedback

As mentioned by Solution Watch, even though you can access many services using IM, negating the need to open a browser and goto the website of the service itself, the functionality is limited eg. post a title and body to your blog, but can’t choose a category/tag.
But it is early days still, and really it isn’t meant to be a replacement for the service itself, it is just a handy way to use some functionality.

It seems public pages of notes, todo’s will be available as well as an RSS feed, this is really cutting into Sabifoo.
I wonder if they could also enable posting to publi.sh by IM (at the moment they offer publishing by email and bookmarklet).

Another bonus is if you have IM on your mobile phone, you can access these applications without having to be on the mobile web which can be costly, my phone provider has an IM fee of $5 a month.

I’m also considering using IM on my phone to access Twitter, instead of using SMS.

I’d like to be able to add a service by IM…this would help in collecting links for future blog posts.
That is, if I’m in my RSS Reader and see a few posts about a new service, and decide I want to collect these posts for a future blog post…from my IM, I want to be able to add a new note channel, and then add notes/links to this channel. When I eventually draft and publish my post I can delete this notes channel.
At the moment I would have to go to IMifiy website first to create the channel, instead it would be much quicker by IM.

From this you can see I want links for future blog posts organised in their own notes channel instead of in one notes channel.

IDEA

Maybe I can have one notes channel, but when I add a note to this channel I can tag my note.
The shortcut to add a note to my notes channel is “na” and the commend for tag could be something like t:tag.

eg. na t:IM this is a great post about a news service called IMified http://www.solutionwatch.com/552/imified-familiar-productivity-with-instant-messaging/