There are tons of applications and services that hope to be daily planners and help you get things done. Almost all of them require you to enter everything yourself. I’ve been waiting for something that would let me search through everything I do online easily. Apple’s Spotlight search is awesome for stuff on your device but there is tons of stuff that’s in the cloud through other services. Cue (Formerly Greplin) aims to change the way you manage your life online.
The main service lets you link different accounts including the usual suspects to it for free. It acts as a smart archiving and search utility for your digital life. It lets you search through emails, Facebook posts, tweets, calendars, dropbox files for anything. It understands the difference between different files as well. Cue is not meant to be a social tool that brings together different feeds. It exists to help you search through your online accounts. If you search for people, Cue shows you your interactions with them along with a nicely presented profile. It also shows you a few timeline-esqe things like when you first interacted with a person and a few of their latest posts. Cue has an iPhone app that aggregates information from your accounts and presents you with a daily planner or a intelligent snapshot of your day as the developers call it. Since this only aggregates information, you can’t actually add stuff here but the way it presents your day to you after searching through everything is pretty amazing. It can also add delivery and flight information that it picks up through your email after you have linked the respective email account.
When people talk about technological advances, most of them are always about the hardware of devices. People spend too much time emphasizing specifications and other things that only matter on paper. Having 2GB RAM in a device doesn’t make it smart. Software and applications like Cue are pushing the envelope further and further ahead in terms of what a smart device can do. This truly is the future. However, stuff like this also has huge privacy concerns, because multiple accounts are being linked to others and some accounts don’t yet support OAuth. After Mat’s incident and Path’s contacts upload fiasco people are reluctant, often paranoid about linking accounts to newer apps. The app also has a location bug right now that keeps your location services on unless you force close it. I hope this is fixed ASAP because there’s nothing else wrong with it.
Cue is a free service that has a premium plan that lets you add more business oriented networks like Yammer that costs $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year. The iPhone app is available for free on the App Store and I urge you to try this because it has the potential to be insanely great.