Today marks a fork in the road for this particular startup. Values of n, the company behind Stikkit and I Want Sandy, will be closing its doors. Both services will going offline at close of business (5pm PST) on Monday December 8th, 2008. Until then, they'll be up and running as usual to allow our users time to make the transition, find alternative services, and download any data they wish to take with them.

While the company and services will be shutting down, Stikkit and Sandy's DNA will live on; the intellectual property behind both has been acquired by Twitter, Inc. While Twitter has no immediate plans to incorporate Sandy or Stikkit's feature sets into its core product, those who know our apps well may notice familiar-feeling bits and bobs appearing in your Twitter experience.

The third tine of this fork is me: I have taken an engineering position in the User Experience group at Twitter. I started consulting there a few months ago, and fell in love with the team, their way of thinking about things, and of course the product (my Twitter user id is in the low 100s). It turns out we worked incredibly well together, the feeling was mutual, and they pulled me in as a permanent member of the team.

I'm excited to continue building simple, engrossing products -- my favorite thing to do -- and to imbue my work with all I've learned over the last three years.

We are so proud of the technology we've created behind the scenes, the experience we've provided our users, and the sense of playfulness and suspension of disbelief we've managed to inject into personal productivity. When I look back at our statement of intent, I realize just how true we've been to what we set out to do and how we set out to do it:

Values of n brings an iconoclastic approach to social software design. We're throwing out the well-worn assumptions about how applications are supposed to work, and are instead paying attention to the clever ways in which people have adapted software to fit their needs. These workarounds usually contain the seeds of a better solution.

We always strive to move beyond software that's "cool" or feature-full to software that's transparent and feature-useful: software so elegantly implemented it becomes an extension of the person using it.

As I blogged mid-last year, "We programmers and engineers aren't so lucky as to find free-standing virtual marble blocks ready for the sculpting. We must first build up the marble block itself until it shows sufficient promise and only then start chipping away to reveal our product's true form." We built up that marble block in Stikkit and subsequently revealed what we believed to be our product's true form in Sandy.

We're honored that our work was recognized by the award-givers (SWSX award for Best Technical Achievement 2007 and Webware 100 award for Productivity), but we've been even more excited about the conversations we've had with our users, both directly and through our applications. So much energy and goodwill has come out of that exchange -- I will personally take that with me as one of the high points as CEO.

None of this would have been possible without an incredible cast of characters. Our investors made it all possible in the first place. Our board provided guidance, asked or answered difficult questions, and kicked our collective asses on just the right occasions. Our team of employees, consultants, and ad hoc barn-raisers infused all we did with a goodly mix of solid engineering, creativity, and fun. Our advisors shared their combined years of wisdom and experience. Our users have been a wellspring of positive energy and support -- even (and especially) when they ran into bugs; in particular, our "deputies," the volunteer user community leaders, took up the slack and provided a helping hand to their peers. And our families and friends -- the unsung heroes of the startup life -- gave us the better part of three years to sink into our work and cheered us along every day.

Thank you to everyone who has made Values of n, Stikkit, and Sandy possible. It has been an honor to work with you and I look forward to continuing the conversation. You can find me at http://raelity.org (blog to be rebooted shortly) and http://twitter.com/rael.

Rael

Rael Dornfest
CEO, Values of n, Inc.

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Questions and answers

When will Stikkit and I want Sandy go offline?

We will be shutting off our servers at close of business (5pm PST) on Monday December 8th, 2008.

Where should I go for further information and help?

I want Sandy: The best place to turn to for help with I want Sandy is our Get Satisfaction user-to-user forum at http://getsatisfaction.com/iwantsandy.

Stikkit: Visit the Stikkit discussion forums at http://community.valuesofn.com/stikkit.

If you can't seem to find what you're after on either of these two forums, please send email to help@valuesofn.com.

How do I cancel my account?

If you'd like to explicitly cancel your account:

I want Sandy: Point your browser at http://iwantsandy.com/cancel.

Stikkit: Send email to help at valuesofn dot com with the subject "Stikkit Cancellation" in the subject line and we'll cancel your account for you.

Can I take my data with me?

But of course! Both Stikkit and I want Sandy provide RSS/Atom and iCalendar feeds of your data that can be downloaded to your computer (and then uploaded to/imported into any other desktop application or online service that supports these same standards.

I want Sandy: Visit http://iwantsandy.com/help/feeds for information on I want Sandy's data feeds.

Stikkit also has a programmatic interface -- the Stikkit API -- that provides more comprehensive access to your data, both directly and through one of the many third-party tools and applications built against it. Visit http://stikkit.com/api#feeds for details.

We will be providing some additional export functionality in the days to come should our users require anything beyond what is provided in these feeds.

What services should we look at to take the place of Stikkit and/or Sandy?

We have been continuously impressed by the following calendar, to-do list, and notebook'ing services:

• Google Calendar
• Remember the Milk
• Backpack
• PBWiki

What will Sandy do now?

Sandy has not filled us in on her plans as yet, but we rather suspect she'll be taking a day or three off for some much deserved offline rest and relaxation -- and she won't be reachable by email ;-).

Ever wonder what it takes to create an email-dwelling left-justified, text-only application? Find out at Web 2.0 Expo - San Francisco (April 22-25, 2008) where I'm honored to be speaking on that very subject...

Making Email a Useful Web App

Why does email continue to thrive despite “email overload” and the occasional need to declare “email bankruptcy.” Why hasn’t it gone away? What does it want from us? Where is it going (aside from my inbox)? What is its ongoing role in a Web 2.0 world?

Email is a thin wrapper of technology around the innately understandable medium of the written word. It provides context and conversation — both explicit and implicit — like nothing else. It is inherently social and collaborative — for lack of a better term, it might even be called a “social network.” And email is a flexible “carrier wave” for wondrous applications: photo albums, file-sharing, backup, invitations, notifications, threaded discussion, …

This session delves into the lessons we’ve learned from email, what it still has to teach us about simplicity, virality, frequency, distribution, and timeliness, and how much more it still has to contribute to the conversation.

We’ll survey the landscape of historical, current, and future killer email apps with an eye to building left-justified, text-only applications that allow email do more, no just suck less.

And we’ll tuck in to just what it takes to create email-dwelling services and applications, from the envelope on in to the words inside: the filtering, cleaning, parsing, and crafting that goes into creating a compelling, conversational interface to data, information, services, workflow — and even other people.

Your head has better things to do than to keep track of the myriad details of daily life. Sandy's mission is to remember those details for you, freeing you up to focus on what's important.

And what better way to keep your eye on the prize than to write it down and keep it front-and-center as you go about your day.

To that end, we've carved out a spot in your Daily Digest to add a goal, guiding principle, or inspirational quote that'll appear at the top of your Digest email each morning and alongside your appointments and to-dos on your "Today" page.

My personal inspiration for this week reads: "Anywhere is walking-distance if you have the time."

To add a goal to your Daily Digest, visit http://iwantsandy.com/home, click the "Customize" link, type or paste it into the "Goal, principle, or inspiration" field, and click the "Save" button. Your goal will appear immediately at the top-right of the page and any time you visit your "Today" page thereafter.UPDATE: Special @goal tag

IF you're among those of Sandy's clients who have already set a goal (Click the "Customize" link on your Daily Digest page at http://iwantsandy.com/home) and are having Sandy keep it front-and-center, you'll love the new @goal tag. Simply tag something with @goal and it'll replace your prior goal and appear in both the web and email versions of your digest. For example:

> Remember "The difference between theory and practice is far greater in practice than in theory" @goal

Do you Gcal? Think inside the 30 Boxes? Outlook (Windows) or iCal (Mac) more your speed? Take your I want Sandy calendar (and to-dos too) with you to any calendar capable of subscribing to remote calendars using the iCalendar standard.



Here's how:

1. Turn on Sandy's private iCalendar feed for your account: visit your Account settings page, select "Yes", and click the "Save" button.

2. Click the "Subscribe" link (iCal or Outlook 2007), "Download" link (Outlook 2003), or copy your private iCalendar feed's address (ready for pasting into Google Calendar, 30 Boxes, and others).

3. Visit Sandy's Calendar feeds help page for details on subscribing Google Calendar, Outlook 2003 and 2007 (Windows), iCal (Mac), and more.

Sandy's a pretty colorful and playful character, always striving not only to help you be more productive, but to bake a little fun into the otherwise functional nature of getting and keeping organized.

To that end, she's taken the wraps off her brand new HTML email format. Sandy's replies and reminders are now richer, prettier, and even more fun! Most importantly, though, they're still just as helpful, functional, and powerful as they've always been -- and there's deeper functionality on the way!

• Anyone signing up as a new client will have HTML email automatically enabled for their account.


• If you're an existing client, you can turn on HTML email by visiting your Email settings page, selecting "Rich text (HTML)" under "Email format", and clicking the Save button.

(We wanted to be sure not to toss existing clients a curve-ball by having email showing up out of the blue.)

The HTML version of Sandy's email messages all still include a plain text version (identical to those you're already used to receiving) for compatibility with email programs that do better with plain text email.

We hope you enjoy the splash of color!

Everyone deserves a personal assistant! That's why Sandy makes it simpler-than-pie to introduce her to friends and share appointments, to-dos, and other details just by Cc'ing her.

Some of you have been asking us to bake invitations right into Sandy's web site so that you can see exactly what Sandy will be mailing off to your friends as well as having the chance to include a note of your own.

And that's just what we've done. At the top of any page on Sandy's web site you'll find a brand new "Invite" link that leads to a brand new "Invite a friend" page.

• Invite one or many friends all in one go.


• A handy "Add from my address book" wizard gives you easy access to your friends' email addresses, wherever they're stored: AOL, Yahoo!, Outlook, Gmail, Plaxo, Palm, ...


• Because you know your friends better than Sandy does, you can choose an invitation template for Sandy to use.


• Enclose a personal note to your friend(s).


• Anyone you invite is added to your Friends list, where you can choose what you would like Sandy to do when when they share something with you.

Give the gift that keeps on reminding!

“In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it.” —Michelangelo

We programmers and engineers aren't so lucky as to find free-standing virtual marble blocks ready for the sculpting. We must first build up the marble block itself until it shows sufficient promise and only then start chipping away to reveal our product's true form.

A shout out to Rob Griffiths over at Macworld's iPhone Central for closing my iPhone + Bose open loop and tuning up my productivity with a simple-yet-not-less-fabulous feat of headphone surgery.

Sandy, our new email assistant, is hard at work learning the ins-and-outs of human email interaction. But despite her busy schedule, she found time to launch a blog.

I've long thought just how odd it is that the sticky notes stuck to your virtual desktop are, well, stuck to your virtual desktop. The affordance of being able to stick a sticky note of the paper variety to someone else's desktop or your other desktop never seems to have made the leap across that atom-to-bit chasm.

Since we released the Stikkit API, I've eagerly awaited a Stikkit widget for my OS X dashboard. And as if by magic, here it is...

Stikkiteer James Adam rolled up his programmatic sleeves and tucked into Dashcode to build a full-featured and well-styled Stikkit Dashboard Widget. Create new stikkits, find and edit existing ones—multiple at a time—and click the "synch" button to save them to Stikkit online. And the widget grabs a snapshot of the latest online each time you show the dashboard so that you always have piping hot stikkits just when you need them.

While you're there picking up your copy of the widget, be sure to read Adam's thoughts on "Stikkit - My Smart, Short-Term Online Memory."

And if you're a Windows stikkiteer, you've a widget too, thanks to the work of Brett Kelly on winstikker. You might have run across Brett's detailed piece on "How to Make Stikkit into Your Personal GTD Powerhouse" featured on Lifehacker a little while back. He also wrote a utility to import your Gmail contacts into Stikkit. Writes Brett, "Any more of this stuff and people are going to start to wonder if I work for Values of n (makers of Stikkit - and no, I don’t work for them - yet ;)."

This is the stuff of Stikkit and the very reason we sat down to write it in the first place and then—quick as we could given the time-constraints of a small team—followed it with a complete, fully-documented API. We're so appreciative of the efforts of so many people to share their expertise with the community, whether that be as apps and code, tips and techniques, detailed write-ups, suggestions, and bug reports.

(Want to try your hand at a widget all your own? No matter which platform you call home, if you're up for a little tinkering you can use either of these two widgets as a starting point as both keep their source in plain sight—and winstikker is licensed as Open Source.)

P.s. Apologies for the title... I just couldn't not.

There are few applications that truly revolutionize the way you use your computer. And only one I've ever come across that utterly invigorates every interaction and application, every nook and cranny. Of course I'm talking about Quicksilver for OS X, described by its author Nicholas Jitkoff as: "A unified, extensible interface for working with applications, contacts, music, and other data." A bold claim—and at the same time a rather vague one. Yet Quicksilver delivers. Whether it clocks you from the word go or quietly sneaks up on you through daily use, QS has a habit of enriching the apps it touches (and there are few it doesn't).

As an avid QS'er (Quicksilverer?), I was thrilled when Merlin Mann tipped me a little while back to the fact that he'd roped Nicholas into building a full-fledged QS plug-in for Stikkit. The plug-in enables you to send text to a new stikkit, edit an existing one, append and prepend, search by text and tag, jump right to the Stikkit you were after, and more. True to form, QS has again revolutionized the way I use yet another app—this time my own.

(If you're a Quicksilver user, simply type Command-Space or your QS trigger of choice, Command-" to get to the plug-ins list, select "Refresh list of plug-ins" from the actions gear at the bottom of the window, and the Stikkit plug-in should show up in the list.)

Fabulous work, Nicholas!

P.s. I'd be remiss in not giving props to AppleScripting talents of Stikkit user iNik who first plugged QS into Stikkit.

As many of you already know (because I'm running to you in hallways!), I'm chairing the O'Reilly ETech Conference in San Diego this week. There's so much intelligence, creativity, and fun in this place. I always swore I'd still run the ETech program even if I left O'Reilly: and, for the 6th year in a row, I'm thrilled and honoured to be involved. (Now if I could only be in all those sessions at the same time.)

Of course, I have plenty to tell you about — namely, Sandy and her debut at Under the Radar last week — but will have to wait till I have more than three minutes at a time in front of the computer. More soon...

I'm still processing the incredible honor Stikkit received last week: the 2007 SXSW Web Award for Best Technical Achievement. Needless to say, we were thrilled beyond belief.

But not for quite the reasons you'd think.

The award validated what we feel we've accomplished with Stikkit: truly interesting, subtly powerful, supremely flexible technology that suggests new ways to think about organization and collaboration.

Indirectly, it also reflected how we and our users have felt about Stikkit: excellent tech, tricky metaphor.

So why then were we so pleased?

Back in January, having reached the same conclusion, we returned to the fundamental promise of Stikkit: that it makes organizing your daily details as simple a jotting down a note or firing off email.

And it dawned on us that the core product had been there all along.

We noticed that active Stikkiteers — ourselves included — tended to interact with Stikkit from the comfort of an already-familiar interface: email. We already know how to use email to collaborate and share; and with the addition of Stikkit's "thinking," our email had become more useful.

We've spent every moment since building something that accentuates all of those qualities of Stikkit that drew people in in the first place, while, at the same time, keeping it simple by baking it right into your inbox.

So the recognition of what we'd achieved technically came at just the right time: as I sat in our office in Portland, Oregon, 2000-odd miles from SXSW, contemplating just how we had come to create our new product.

I'll post more details in the next few days. For right now, though, I just want to thank the SXSW judges for the presciently-timed vote of confidence.

Brett Kelly wrote an extensive guide to using Stikkit as a GTD Powerhouse that was then linked to by Lifehacker. It's obvious Brett put in a lot of effort into thinking this through and writing it up, and we really appreciate it.

I just had the considerable honor of standing on a stage in front of what must have been a few thousand people, all who are passionate about creating things for the web, and accepting the award for Stikkit for Best Technical Achievement. Of course a million things ran through my mind about what I would say once I walked on stage, but once in front of the mic, all I could say was how excited I was, and how I wished Rael could be there to enjoy the moment with Asha and I.

Had I had my wits about me, I would have said:

We couldn't have done it without the considerable efforts of everyone who has worked on Stikkit, but just as important, those who have used Stikkit and given us good feedback and criticism. Thanks for giving us the opportunity to share what we love with you.

We've been cooking up a little something interesting to present at the Under the Radar : Why Office 2.0 Matters conference in Menlo Park on March 23. If you're at the conference or in the neighborhood, Michael and I would love to meet you in person.

When I first saw these stunning paper sculptures by Jen Stark my heart jumped as I thought they were done using standard sticky notes. Despite the fact that they're not, and are made from construction paper, I still think they're totally noteworthy (ahem), and suspect someone might be able to do something similar with sticky notes. I might break out the X-Acto knife and try it myself, but I'd encourage others to beat me to it.

The week of SXSW is fast approaching and evening events are starting to pop up. Last year I helped organize the first Austin on Rails Happy Hour with Damon Clinkscales and Rob Jones. This year the Stikkit team will be pitching in to help make this event happen and Rael, Asha, and I will be there and look forward to meeting you in person.

Last year's event was a ball—we had over 150 people show up and many great introductions were made and friendships formed.

The Austin on Rails Happy Hour (stikkit!) will be held on March 12th from 6-9pm.

The venue will be the same as last year: Buffalo Billiards is comfortable and inviting, has shuffle board and pool tables, and plenty of room to meet fellow Rails developers.

Technorati Tags: community, sxsw, rails, stikkit

I've been on something of an IM-as-super-client kick for some time now, and when Rael first unfolded the idea of Stikkit to me, my first thought was that someday perhaps we could even stikkit via IM.

The entire Stikkit team lives and breathes in IM and we've kept meaning to find a few spare cycles to pull together our very own StikkitBot.

And so we're pretty excited to see that the recently released IMified has just hooked up Stikkit as an available IMified service. Send a message to the IMified bot and you instantly receive a URL to follow to add Stikkit to your newly-created account. Once you've added Stikkit as a service, you can create stikkits through the bot. They plan on adding more features to the service soon.

Overall, IMified is an impressive first take on something that I hope will become more and more mainstream.