Ditching RememberTheMilk
I’ve always liked Remember The Milk, the “web 2.0″ online task manager that is so well syndicated over channels such as Google Calendar, Twitter, mobile apps, etc. Also, the RTM team is situated in Chatswood, Sydney which is a place that I fondly recall inhabitating while in Australia. Because of this, and the fact that no one can resist the cuteness of their moo-moo cow logo and their mascot, Bob T. Monkey, I have a natural affinity towards the service.
It didn’t take long for me to find out that this affinity is uni-directional. RTM’s seeming openness is only superficial.
The story began almost a year ago.
I have been using MojiPage (my startup) daily for checking weather, reading news, and interacting with social media sites. Knowing that RTM has an API (who doesn’t these days?), I thought to myself: “how great would it be if I could write an RTM widget for MojiPage?”
So, I looked up what I need to achieve the idea, and found out that RTM issues API keys to non-commercial developers, but commercial arrangement is possible with prior arrangement. Quoting their API page:
The Remember The Milk API allows anyone to write applications that interact with Remember The Milk. At this time, the API is available for non-commercial use by outside developers (however, commercial use is possible by prior arrangement). The design of the Remember The Milk API was inspired by the Flickr API.
I’m not averse to working out an arrangement with RTM. Given that the Flickr API had similar licensing restrictions and yet they granted us a license, I couldn’t imagine it’ll be too much of a problem. So, I applied for an API key outlining my proposal to RTM.
A day, two days, god knows how many days passed.. no response.
Thinking that my message could have ended up in their spam box, I re-applied for it. Again, weeks passed without any answer, not even an acknowledgement email. I cannot recall if there was a third message that I sent, but I also tried calling the number gotten from their domain whois record, only to reach a voicemail box always. Leaving voicemail didn’t elicit any response either.
Now, I can understand that RTM is a subscription-based service, and they need to protect their revenue stream but is a response too much to ask?
For this reason, I’m migrating my personal TODO list over to Evernote, which looks more feature-complete over what RTM offers. I’m looking forward to it.
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