Last week, I explained why I want a Web Event Broker. Today, I learned about billQ, a new service that helps you keep track of your bills, and this reminded me of another good reason to want such a broker: reminders.

Reminders are useful for the mundane yet important things of our daily lives: anniversaries, birthdays, bills, etc. Miss one, and you’re in a world of hurt. And because such events tend to be recurrent, you’re very likely to actually miss one at some point if your personal system is not working perfectly.

Theoretically, you could use a single application to manage all your events and corresponding reminders. Nevertheless, different events have different recurrence patterns and carry different informations, therefore you might be tempted to use multiple applications, one for each major type of event. You could use Hallmark for anniversaries and birthdays, and billQ for bills for example. But having a way to aggregate reminders and pipe them through some event handlers for further processing might be useful.

In order to do this, email-based reminders could include an hCalendar microformat code snipet that would allow the Web Event Broker to easily parse the event. Service-specific connectors could also be developed in order to add this information for services that do not natively support microformats.

Custom event handlers would come in handy for things like multiple notifications. Not all anniversaries are created equal. I will be fine if I forget the anniversary of the day when my wife and I moved into our new appartment — in fact, I even doubt that I should create a reminder for it, but I certainly won’t be forgiven if I forget the anniversary of our wedding, and for this event I would like to get reminded two to three months ahead of time for making a dinner reservation, a month in advance for buying the proper gift, and two hours before dinner time so that I do not forget to leave work a little bit earlier in order to buy flowers on my way back home or to the restaurant. I doubt that a service like Hallmark will let me do that, and this is precisely the kind of event handling rule that I would like to build with a Web Event Broker.

I want a Web Event Broker, I really do.