Seriously! Start forgetting things and stop remembering.
Development on Task.fm started about a year ago – let me take you back there to a time where I was unorganised, had no motivation and my memory was shocking. Here’s the story of how and why Task.fm was born.
“Anthony don’t forget to call such and such. Its already been a week and shes expecting your call.” 2 minutes later and i had forgotten I was meant to call such and such. Even after writing down that I needed to “remember to call such and such” I had forgotten to look at the piece of paper. Such and such never got that call.
Does this sound familiar? Diaries, calendars, todo lists are all great…if you constantly keep checking them. I have a shocking memory and unfortunately I need to remember a lot of things. I’ve tried diaries, post it notes, lists, stars in Gmail…the list goes on. Often they work for a while until a forget to look!
You can see where the story is heading. I got fed up chasing app after app hoping I might strike gold, that I decided to go it alone and build my own. This decision luckily also coincided with me needing a “career”. And so task.fm was born.
I didn’t want to build another web based task list or notetaker. There are plenty of those already.  Instead I simply wanted to forget – to outsource my memory to someone else.
The very first version of Task.fm took me and a virtual team less than a month to build. It sucked. There was no natural language recognition, no sms functionality or even email reminders! It did however make an amazing prank calling tool because voice reminders was the first thing we built.  Of course no one but the team used this version and it was many months later before the public got let in to my project. And thankfully new updates are pushed to the site every week, which means the user experience keeps getting better.
When the public first saw Task.fm the reaction was mainly very positive. And the site has since been featured on Lifehacker, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, and even the Today Show. Unfortunately almost every review of the app compared us to the wonderful task manager RememberTheMilk.  Thats some tough competition – but luckily for you guys, im not focused on creating RememberTheMilk, instead i’m trying to give you the closest thing to a personal assistant as possible in the shape of a web app.
The premise of Task.fm is extremely simple – you ask it to remind you of something and it shall. Try it – “remind me to pay the water bill in 2 weeks”.  In two weeks you’ll get an sms, email, voice call or Twitter reminder (you choose) letting you know you should pay the water bill.  You’ll notice you don’t need to work out any dates or times – Task.fm is smart. But unlike a personal assistant to always available wherever you are. Create reminders using email, twitter or even a phone call using your voice.  You don’t need to know any dates, and its all done using natural language.
But does it actually work? According to the logs im officially Task.fm’s number one user having created more reminders and spent more time on the site than anyone else. So, although being horribly biased, I am appropriately qualified to say it works like a charm. I am now constantly forgetting everything and outsourcing it all to Task.fm. My memory process – In through ears out through fingers onto keyboard.
So what’s in store for Task.fm users in the future? More integrations and more smarts. Integration wise, our goal is to make creating a reminder so simple it requires no thought. So expect to see Task.fm integrated with a number of other technologies such as IM.  “Smarts” are also constantly being added. Thanks to you, the users and your feedback, we have a huge list of terms and phrases that our personal assistant should understand in the future.   Remember, if you ever input something that Task.fm doesn’t understand drop us a line so we can add it.
So start forgetting! Let Task.fm remember for you.
Anthony Feint is the founder of Task.fm. He blogs here and tweets here
