Welcoming Timeful to Google (opens in new tab)

I guess they have Google Keep for that use-case now, so perhaps it's unlikely? The Keep task list feature there is decent, with checkable items that automatically go to the bottom when done, the ability to set time or location based reminders, and sharing with others.

Still, it's a bit of a pain that it's embedded in a more general app - for me, that means it can be a bit hard to find my task lists among other notes or photos.

The gmail task applet wasn't great (usable, but barely). It's a real pity Google can't just get this right, because it's exactly the kind of basic functionality that you don't want to have another login/provider for, and want good mobile / web / cloud syncing for.

Timeful was a TODO/task company, they just approached the problem in a different way, by arguing that the calendar and the TODO list should be the same app, not separate apps.

The idea was to have a TODO list with actual time committments associated, and you had the ability to actually schedule your TODO by slotting them into your calendar.

Functionally, it was a great idea, but it suffered greatly from a lack of integration with most other tools on the market. If Google runs with it, it could be interesting, hopefully they actually do something with the idea.

I hope they consolidate keep and tasks into a single product. It is not a bad thing to try to different competing approaches (inbox vs gmail), but Google does tend to do that a lot.

What's up with buying though. Why can't their teams come out with new features themselves.

From an email that was sent to all Timeful accounts:

    A couple things to note:
    
    * Timeful will remain in the App Store, and
    we'll continue to support it. We won't be
    adding new features, but we're more than
    happy to help you with bugs or answer any
    questions you have.
    * If you'd like, you can export your data
    out of Timeful (http://www2.timeful.com/export/)
    at any time.

Looks like they are sunsetting. They will be focusing on other projects at google

Not evidence of anything, but I recently got a survey request when using Google Calendar. That's pretty uncommon. So I do wonder if Google is getting interested in the Calendar again, and what they plan to do with it.

I'm not familiar with the purchased company but it almost sounds like they'd want to integrate it more into Google Now than Calendar. Maybe some finer integration of both.

Google has two competing teams working on this kind of thing: the Gmail/Calendar team and the Inbox team. My guess is that the Timeful people will join one of those teams, and whichever one it is gets to integrate these features

From what I have heard, Inbox has been conceived by some of the guys behind Sparrow (another Google's acquisition). There is a good number of simple acqui-hire, but it looks like from time to time, Google also tries to let these people work on their field of expertise.

I was thinking the same, all round their snooze feature misses edge cases often. It's a solid and smart set of defaults, but it could certainly be improved. For one, if I get an email with a schedule (say a train ticket) I have to go to Gmail then add it to the calendar. It'd be way smoother to just snooze until the day mentioned, and they could presumably use the same stuff Gmail uses to extract calendar events to do so.

BTW I think the idea of the current snooze someday is to save it in snooze instead of done without setting a reminder because it's easier to find stuff there. It's lower friction than using a different app but I doubt it'll scale well to many saved things.

Really I just hope Google have a plan to bring these things together, I think the inbox and Google now reminders are linked, but the keep ones aren't? And Gmail makes calendar events instead, it's all a bit messy.

I'm building an android app for that in my spare time. Once it's ready, I'm planning to integrate it with Calendar somehow...

They are rel="nofollow" links. I think that makes it "okay" in the eyes of Google, but not certain.

I've yet to see a primary source where Google clearly state that they don't mind what you do with nofollow links. It's clear that Google was originally ignoring them, but some of their policies around comment spam and such do suggest that they could pass along negative value to the sites being linked. It's just not clear what circumstances trigger that.