After signing up for a free account, you’ll get a web interface with a box to type. Put in something like “Feed the cat next week” and it will strip off the “next week” part, parse it to get the date, and make the rest the text of your reminder. Then it adds it to the rest of your reminders on the web page. A search box lets you find reminders with particular text, and brighter white is used to highlight the more immediate tasks.

Other features of Deadline include reminders via email or Jabber-based IM, the ability to set reminders by sending email to a personalized Deadline address, and a mobile user interface. For the future, they’re planning an iPhone application, customization, and an API, among other things.

I found Deadline easy to use, though its parsing of English was less full-featured than I’d like (“in a year”, for example, seems to be giving the wrong results). It’ll pop up a box for direct date entry if it doesn’t see any date at all in your entry. Overall, Deadline has less functionality than the most similar service I know, I Want Sandy, but Deadline’s user interface is easier to navigate if you just want to track dates.

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