Over at Boing Boing, Margaret Robinson explores an alternate universe where a certain crossword puzzle clue is right, and Mario was created by Nolan Bushnell.

I blogged about I Want Sandy shutting down Monday, and I’ve been watching the fallout for the last few days.  A lot of people are understandably upset that the personal organizer they’ve come to rely on is going away in less than two weeks.  I know I’m feeling lost, as I came to Sandy at the end of a long search for tools to keep my own life organized.

Chris at HTMList summarized users’ reactions, and I recommend his blog post for anyone thinking of setting up their own “cloud” service that people are going to rely on.  After all, this is just the first of many such shutdowns we’re going to see as the world economy straightens itself out.  It’s important these shutdowns are handled right if we’re ever going to see a Web 3.0 boom:

This further goes to erode people’s trust in web 2.0 applications in general. This poisons the well. While people understand there is some risk in putting their eggs into free web 2.0 baskets, all it takes are a few terrible shutdowns like this one to get people gun shy and reluctant to use other applications.

I wasn’t an official member of the I Want Sandy team, only a “non-employee deputy”, a quasi-official rep who helped people out in the forums.  I was one of the more passionate users who ducked his virtual head into the public town hall meeting (a Campfire chatroom) once a week to keep up on things.  So, I didn’t have access to any secrets, and this announcement came as a surprise to me, too.  Still, I saw signs that something was going to happen, and a tiny part of me was already considering a switch to another service.

Rael has been really busy these past few months, and hasn’t had much time to work on I Want Sandy.  He hasn’t added new functionality, and the promised API was taking forever.  What time Rael had to work on Sandy was spent optimizing the mail daemons that sent out reminders and Daily Digests.  The situation there was getting bad, and people were complaining about reminders coming an hour or more late.  I always assumed personal business and Stikkit, the company’s other product, were the time-sucks, but now I’ve learned that Twitter brought Rael on as a consultant a few months ago.

I’d love to write a replacement for Sandy myself, but I don’t want the obligation of running a popular web service on top of my day job.  I wonder if any of my Net Fest buddies would be interested in helping out.  At any rate, I’d certainly take a tip from David Heinemeier at 37 Signals and charge for my service.  It certainly would have been harder for Rael to back out like this on paying customers.

Still, as a web developer, I understand the way things go in this industry.  This is probably the best move for Rael himself, getting involved with a company with some financial backing, given the current economic situation.

I just received an email from Rael at Values of n letting everyone know they’re closing their doors.  Their intellectual property, including Sandy, was bought by Twitter, and Rael will be working there full time soon.  That sounds like an awesome opportunity for him, and I don’t want to diminish the potential there.

It wont be hard to move all my appointments and to-dos over to Remember the Milk or some other application.  And, I’m sure I’ll get used to the new system in time  But, I think Sandy’s “personality” is what made this particular to-do manager work for me.  It was easy to suspend disbelief, and think of it more as a “her” than just a web-based service.  I felt like I was letting her down if I didn’t take care of my to-dos, and I certainly didn’t want her thinking I was ignoring her when she reminded me to “talk to Jason about those spreadsheets”.

The conversational interface helped create the illusion.  I could cc: her on an email and say “Sandy, remind me to go over this document with Diane tomorrow”, and she’d know what I was talking about.

If I can’t find something else that works for me, I may try to whip up something similar on my own.  Saying that makes me feel like the lead character in Frankenhooker, though.  *shiver*