One of my favorite services dies

We've just started a group trying to rebuild Sandy as an open-source application; anybody interested is welcome to join us at sandysback (no content yet but we grabbed that name on as many services as we could think of — sandysback.googlecode.com for sources, wikis etc, the sandysback Google group for discussion, and so on).

This was a good service but if it's a tabulated form would have been better. I have more ideas to discuss.

I poked around it for a bit.

Seems nichey… A supplemental calendar/reminder app. I have never needed such functionality and I can assume that a large segment of the population would be similar.

Most people who use a calendar application use Outlook because they can sync all of their calendars conveniently between work, home, and even while out and about on their Cellular/WiFi PDAs.

Granted, not everyone has a PDA… I would think that this service would cater to a couple of different niche markets:

1. People who need or want LOTS of very simple reminders via SMS/Email.

2. People managing the calendars of other people for them (e.g. children/family, disorganized subordinates, etc.). Especially for groups with disparate calendar types. It's easy enough to feed meeting entries through Outlook at work, but you might not be able to Outlook the kids…

3. People who don't have a PDA or a phone with an Outlook syncing calendar app that are frequently away from their base of operations.

All in all, I'm seeing an overall picture of a rather small segment of the population.

Therefore, IWS would have to be set up as sort of a… niche program. You can always make a bit of cash on a valuable service (provided that you actually charge for it). You simply set up your service to accommodate the population you find. A service as simple as IWS's little SMS parser language could surely run on a very small scale and would be quite easily hosted very cheaply by the service provider.

The essential problem being for the service provider: Is the service worth my time to maintain as a standalone web application? What am I, as the developer, getting out of this besides the self-satisfaction of having created a nifty little parser app?

I don't think the service died because of fiscal insolvency… such a thing would be easily done even on the thinnest of shoe-strings even if you had to migrate to charging a subscription fee. I think it died because it wanted to–From the little letter on the front, it looks like it's primary dude (Rael Dornfest) may have become more interested in working with the Twitter people than maintaining a rather small service of his own.

My point:

He could easily have survived… Just about anyone could afford a minimal hosting fee to run that little application–$25 to $75 a month and charge your users a buck a month to use it.

O'course, how many employees was he paying? How many SHOULD he have been paying, etc. I'm obviously not looking at the books, but even if it was just himself, it would be a sustainable project provided one had the inclination to sustain said project.

Wouldn't you agree?

I would also have to say that I agree with Manuj that the app is just screaming for a triple-threat tabular interface (Day/Week/Month) that's compatible both with PC and PDA screen formats and maybe dedicated BlackBerry and iPhone apps to make it slicker on those hot new toys.

With a good basic calendar interface, it's existence as a web service would be an excellent way to handle a diverse client population. It would free you from the unholy bonds of matrimony with one of the big synchro providers like RIM or M$.

Add to that a little updating to the SMS reader so that you could widen the appointment types out a bit with some auto-scheduler flag types like "Busy" and "Free" so that the system could also suggest times for meetings……….

Could be neat if you wanted to work with it.

Also, if you're planning on using something as an income vehicle, at some point, you need to take responsibility for your own marketing.

You can't simply have a nifty service and rely on your existing consumer base to expand itself.

While Word Of Mouth is god of all marketing, it's not always the easiest type to get moving. Incentive programs like discounting service in exchange for referrals can increase the chances of it happening provided it's easy to do.

From what I'm seeing though, the service itself looks like more of a feature that's waiting to be tacked on to a larger service than a full blown application of its own (kind of like hooking a minimalist interface up to some existing DLL function and calling it an application).

This and the fact that there is so much more interesting work to be done with Sandy that wasn't explored. As a stand-alone, it's obviously very limited in scope, but integration with a more comprehensive service package makes it more marketable.

In order to get the most Calendar bang for your Calendar buck, you'd have to use at least one other application with it–RIM or M$.

To entertain the widest audience, it would have to have some sort of integration with existing calendar applications (for instance, the ability to push entries to BlackBerries/Outlook–I don't know how either works at present, but it would be a terribly useful feature) and a stand-alone MWD tabular interface are a good start.

That way, not only can you add functionality to embedded MS/RIM client-base, you can convert and initiate new customers with your own stand-alone interface.