You’ve asked and it is delivered: Skritter can now tweet your progress for you. Head over to the new reminders page to set it up, if you use Twitter.
“But why would I want Skritter on my Twitter, because despite the names they confusingly seem to have nothing in common?” you ask. Three reasons: to show off how fast you’re learning; to let your Chinese-studying friends know what they’re missing; and to set public goals for yourself.
I’ve got a hunch that the publicizing of progress in this way will help you stay on the practicing wagon. I think this because I just finished building it, turned it on for my Twitter account (nwinter), realized that it was soon going to tweet that I had only practiced for 20 minutes in the last week, and immediately started practicing again so I wouldn’t look like the total slacker that I am. Fortunately, Skritter didn’t mind too much, as 30 minutes took care of my review queue and I’m back on track.
I’ve also set it up so that Skritter can privately email these reports to you, as a first step in planned goal-tracking schemes. This is all very first-draft, experimental sort of stuff, so we need a lot of feedback on this. How would you want reminders to work? What would you want them to say? What other services would you like to feed your Skritter progress to? What about goals–do you want goals on time spent, characters learned, words learned, days practiced in a row? Let us know in the comments or on this forum thread.
Note: we might premium-ize parts of this, but that’d happen much later.