One of the things we strive for at ididwork is to make it as simple and fast as possible for you to log your work entries. Ideally, you wouldn’t even have to log into our site. We’re taking the first step towards that goal today with the launch of our new feature - integration with AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MSN, and Gtalk to log your entries.
When you log in, the first change you’ll notice is a “Use IM” link in the top bar:

When you click it, you’ll be taken to a page in the settings where you can enable your IM screenname:

Enter your screen name, and choose which IM service you’re using from the dropdown menu. When you click “Save Changes”, you’ll be taken to a page that will show you which IM screen name to message:

In this case, for my gtalk account, I would message “[email protected]”.
That’s it! You can now add that screenname to your buddy list and start messaging in your work entries.
You’ll also notice some helpful tips on how to add tags, time, and todo tokens to your entry. We’ve updated the syntax a bit - in an earlier iteration of ididwork the syntax was to enclose all special tokens with brackets. We’ve now changed it to a simple rule - put a “#” mark in front of any tag. For example, regarding this blog post, I would submit something like this:
“#blog #:30 Finished the new blog post about IM integration”
#blog is the tag, and #:30 means I spent 30 minutes writing it. If I wanted to add it as a todo item, I would have just added “#todo” to the entry as well.
Why’d we change the syntax? We’ve found through several usability tests that in most cases, it’s a bit faster and easier to type the ‘#’ symbol.
This is just the beginning. We’ll be adding many more ways to enter or transfer data into the system, and better ways of getting it out. If you have any ideas regarding either of these (email, firefox plugins, desktop widget, etc), feel free to leave a comment or email us at feedback[at]ididwork.com.