Interesting acquisition from Google: Timeful was an iPhone app that combined events, todos, and ‘habits’ in a single calendar UI that could suggest the best time to schedule everything according to your patterns, location, and available times.
Here’s how TechCrunch described Timeful last year:
From the user’s perspective, Timeful works like this: You link the app to any of your existing calendar apps, such as iCal, Microsoft Exchange, or Google Calendar. You then tell the app additional things you need to and would like to do, providing concrete things like “buy milk” and more fuzzy things like “exercise” or “cook dinner more often.” You also select a level of aggressiveness that you’d like Timeful to have when suggesting times and activities, from laid-back, to very ambitious. Timeful then provides you with a customized calendar that incorporates all of the things you need to do and want to do at the times that would be best for you to actually make sure they get done.
I remember trying Timeful when it came out and thinking that I didn’t want to put all my events and reminders in a standalone utility for iPhone with no iPad or web counterparts.
Timeful seems to make more sense as an addition to Calendar and Inbox, the company’s alternative take on email that features location and time-based reminders. Google could use Timeful’s intelligence to predict when a user is most likely to tackle todos or suggest the best times to schedule a new event or meeting. According to a post on the Gmail blog, it sounds like Timeful tech will indeed be rolled out across several Google properties:
We’re excited about all the ways Timeful’s technology can be applied across products like Inbox, Calendar and beyond, so we can do more of the work for you and let you focus on being creative, having fun and spending time with the people you care about.
In the meantime, Timeful will be kept on the App Store, but it’ll no longer receive new features as “the team’s attention will be on new projects at Google”.