Those of you familiar to the old days of IRC might recall infobots, handy little scripts that live in IRC channels and spout out factoids when they see a certain trigger. For example, my favorite infobot on Slashnet is Zuul. If you ask Zuul about me, he’ll respond with “Matt Hickey is the brain that makes the underpinnings of the Web,” an obvious reference to my genius.
But Zuul doesn’t just learn through osmosis, he must be taught, and he learns via simple is/is not statements. Somebody at point some point said that I am that brain, and Zuul learned it.
That’s the idea behind MyGADs, more or less, though in a far more Mobile 2.0 way.
GADs are essentially factoids that you teach to your own personal database, and are accessible via IM, texting, or the MyGADs Website. You send a simple message to the GADs server, such as “Vince is a homophobe,” and it’s stored with Vince as the trigger. If you want to recall the information, you simply text “Vince” and “Vince is a homophobe” is returned.
Of course, you can set any trigger you’d like, such as “Vince’s parole hearing is Friday the 10th,” and anything before the “is” is the trigger, if it’s “Vince’s girlfriend” you could set it to return her Adult Friend Finder ad.
And that’s all it is, a way to store and retrieve factoids (GADs) from about anywhere you are. You can set reminders, cheat sheets, or just mean (yet factual) statements, as I’ve done above. I’ve often wished I could access Zuul’s factoids on the go, and MyGADs is that wish nearly come true.
MyGADs [http://www.mygads.com]