There’s an old saying that the only person who ever changes you is your mother because she does two things: she always has a simple message (eat your vegetables, brush your teeth) and she keeps repeating that message over and over. When we set out with Beeminder to help people modify their behavior, we explicitly built our BeeBot with that mindset. By putting your goals constantly in front of you and bringing your long-term goals close, we hope to effect real and positive change in your life.
So today we’re giving you another way to interact with the BeeBot — through SMS text messages.
We’re rolling this out slowly (as always, email us if you want to be part of the beta test) but starting today, you can get text reminders for all your graphs and respond with data directly from your phone.
To get started:
Go to My Account and add your phone number. We’ll send you a text message to ACTIVATE that number. Just reply to 70-DID-MY-BEE (703-436-9233) with the word ACTIVATE and you’ll start getting text reminders at around the same time our email reminders go to you.
You can respond to that text and enter datapoints using the format graphname day value. For example, this will update your weight graph with a value of 150 on the 20th: weight 20 150. The BeeBot will respond with a confirmation message to let you know it understood your data. You can put in multiple points if you put them on separate lines. You can also include an optional comment in quotes after your number.
If you get tired of being bugged (we understand… BeeBot will be sad though) just send STOP to the number and BeeBot will buzz off. We know it’s annoying to have to think about that though, so the bot also buzzes off automatically if you stop entering data (with the exception that it will remind you again if you’re about to drive off your yellow brick road).
We hope to make Beeminding yourself as simple and enjoyable as possible and the BeeBot looks forward to buzzing your way!
Huge thanks to Grace Yang for hacking on this!