It’s great to see that Alina Dizik is reviewing Slife in The Wall Street’s Cranky Consumer column today. She does bring up a few things that we are hoping to improve, such as being able to sign-up without a credit card, among other things that we would like to address.

We are planning to bring a number of changes to the Slife platform in 2010. The key goal is simplicity. We are still finalizing all the details and hope to reveal our grand plan soon.

You may have noticed that we’ve been quiet here recently. That’s because we’ve been busy working on some improvements for the Slife client and also the web applications (Slife Web/Teams). We hope to push out a new release in the first week of December.

We are also about to enter holiday territory, first with Thanksgiving and then later in December with Christmas. The pace of business is slowing down.

The closeness to a new year and the aforementioned slow down make this an ideal time for planning, and this is what we are going to do for a large part of December. And take a well deserved week of rest, of course.

Until you hear from us again, which shouldn’t be too long from now, Happy Thanksgiving!

It’s the story of our lives. So much to do, so little time. What options do we have to keep up with an increasing number of people and “things” demanding our attention?

Peter Bregman offers some good suggestions in this well articulated piece, posted back in May. How about saying no to activities that you don’t consider critically important? Or keeping an “ignore list”?

Here’s one of the key quotes from the article:

“… our success actually hinges on the opposite: on our willingness to risk missing some information. Because trying to focus on it all is a risk in itself. We’ll exhaust ourselves. We’ll get confused, nervous, and irritable.”

If you’d like to read the whole story, you can find it here.

Just a quick post to let all of your know that we’ve released a minor update to the Slife client today, for both Windows and Mac.

On the Mac, it should be available through auto-update. If you would like to update the Windows version, login to your Slife Web/Teams account, click on the “Download” button and choose the Windows icon.

The primary reason for this release is to bring the client to parity with some backend changes we’ve made to Slife Teams. But we have also made a few changes that will result in slightly better performance and stability.

Coming up, the v3.1 client – some new features and bug fixes. Stay tuned.

Every once in a while we like to post a link or two that is related to productivity. Today I came across an interesting perspective on the topic of time management – How do super-achievers manage their time? Do they carry a to-do list? Do they subscribe to the GTD system?

This short post claims that they don’t, and explains why. It does make sense, but as usual, it’s one of those cases of easier said than done.

Perhaps what I like the most about the philosophy of the “zero to-do list” is the opportunistic nature of the lifestyle. Focus on what’s important.

For quite some time, one of the most popular feature requests has been the ability to associate web sites and documents with keywords. Today, we are bringing this capability to Slife Web. It’s very cool.

Let’s say you would like to associate the keyword “wall street journal” or “wsj.com” with the “Reading News” activity. Click on the “Activities” tab on the left and hit the “Associations” link for the “Reading News” activity. This is what you will see:

At the top are the associations you might have already made by going into the “Applications” and “Web & Docs” views. Now, there’s another section at the bottom where you can enter keywords.

Slife is always trying to match document and web page titles and urls with your keywords. When it finds a match, it counts time towards the activity the keyword is under. The match doesn’t have to be exact. As long as the keyword is contained within a title or url, it will work.

Give it a try and let us know how this feature is working for your, we would love to hear your feedback. Since today is Monday, it’s also time for this week’s worklist. We are in the middle of a big update to Slife Teams and that will be our main focus the next few days. We also plan to do a little bit of work to make sure this new keyword feature is working very smoothly for everybody.

For those of you who were wondering about our server transition, I am happy to say that we’ve just installed our very last configuration script. We are now done!

Of course, there might be a hiccup here and there, but overall the entire upgrade went very smoothly. Why did it take so long, you might ask? Our goal was to complete the transition by the end of September. We started the whole process early and gave ourselves plenty of time for testing and debugging. It worked out really well.

It’s wonderful to be done with this and get back to what’s really exciting to us – improving our products. Not too long from now we will be releasing a couple of very useful features to Slife Web and a new Slife Teams revision.

It’s time to boost up the server capacity and flexibility of our server infrastructure. We couldn’t be happier about this work. It’s a sign that more and more people are using Slife, to the point that we need more juice in the machines.

Over the next week we will be transferring our sites and applications to a cloud based environment. We are staying with Rackspace, since they’ve been very good to us in the past.

So, what does this mean to you? If you try to access your Slife Web dashboard, our home page or any other part of our site and have trouble, it’s most likely because of this transition. We will do our best to keep all disruptions to a minimum.

As per usual, feel free to ping us or email (support at slife labs).

The first half of the week has been all about open source for us. We released the Slife 2.5 client late last Friday and have been updating our web site and announcing the news over the last couple of days.

Starting today and throughout the rest of the week we will be changing gears. It’s time to move Slife Web, Slife Teams and all of our server setup to a new cloud-based infrastructure. We will be announcing any downtime here and also in our Twitter feed.

We first announced our plans to open source the Slife v2.x client right at the beginning of the Summer, around the same time that we released Slife Web. We were shooting for an end-of-August release but couldn’t meet that deadline.

The good news is, we only slipped for a couple of weeks. The new “old” Slife client is here, as open source and under the GPL license. We are very excited about this and wanted to share this announcement with you as soon as possible, even though it’s close to 6PM on a Friday here on the East Coast.

To be clear, this is the Slife v2.x client, the rich desktop client that precedes our current Slife web-based platform. And it’s the MacOS X version of the client. For the time being, we have no plans to open source the Windows client, since there was so little demand for it. We are calling this the Slife v2.5 client.

We decided to host the project under Google Code, a pretty good platform that has been recommended to us by lots of people. There’s not much there right now, except for the source code and the application as a zip file, but I am sure things are going to get busy as more people get involved and contribute to the project.

Over the years, like any other software company, we’ve benefitted tremendously from the generosity of others who’ve built and distributed software as open source. This is the first time we are giving back and we hope to do more of this in the future.