Twitter yesterday announced the acquisition of small-time Web 2.0 startup Values of N, creator of the utilities I Want Sandy and Stikkit. We’ve covered both companies here previously at Mashable, and I’ve spoken several times about my general love for I Want Sandy as a unique and valuable approach to the virtual personal assistant problem.

I Want Sandy is a virtual personal assistant that’s integrated with your email so that keeping track of appointments and such is a slightly less stressful fact of every day life […] I Want Sandy works by offering you your own email address. This is good because it means you can send something to your account from any email address, and it doesn’t need to come directly from your registered email address in order to add items. Likewise, CC’ing Sandy on an email sent to another person will also be integrated for your account. There are a few things that you can ask Sandy to do, like remind you of a project that needs to be turned in next Friday, add items to your to-do list, or add things to your calendar.

The acquisition is widely regarded as a personnel acquisition, rather than a technology acquisition. In Ev Williams announcement on the Twitterblog, he mentioned some of the details of the acquisition:

Values of n will be shutting down existing products. However, the technology behind the scenes will live on and potentially re-emerge as part of Twitter’s systems, services, user experience, or open source libraries. Nothing specific in this regard is planned but there is some smart work in there by the newest member of our engineering team.

I struggled to come up with a unique angle on this story since I heard the news yesterday, since we don’t typically write up what essentially amounts to hirings of engineers here at Mashable. Then I saw a particularly interesting tidbit mentioned by MG Siegler over at Venturebeat, immediately followed by a post by Dave over at Evil Genius Chronicles.

MG points to a correlative personal blog post from the engineer for whom the acquisition was made, spilling a little more detail regarding the future of I Want Sandy:

While Twitter has no immediate plans to incorporate Sandy or Stikkit’s feature sets into its core product, those who know our apps well may notice familiar-feeling bits and bobs appearing in your Twitter experience.

While I was heartened by the fact that I Want Sandy may or may not completely disappear, I couldn’t help but empathize with the sentiments expressed by Dave at EGC:

I kept building a slow burn on this until I decided I’m done. I had been pushing my FriendFeed updates to Twitter since they added that functionality but now I’m turning it off. I don’t want to do anything to that builds value for Twitter. I’m withdrawing my participation from them. […] I used Sandy and l liked it a lot. In fact, the main reason I stopped using it on a daily basis and started using Google Calendar and documents for that kind of work is when Twitter took IM access away. I’m highly pissed about this. It makes no sense to me why even if Twitter acquired Value of N they can’t leave the services up and running with a skeleton crew. This just reinforces the idea that you should be careful what services you commit your time and energy to, because Web 2.0 companies will screw you and make you waste your time building value that they cash out and leave you holding the bag.

He has a strong point, and while I still enjoy Twitter enough that I can’t see myself getting rid of the service, I did very much enjoy I Want Sandy, and just like Dave, relied on it exclusively for scheduling until Twitter disabled IM functionality.

I never found the parser that functioned from the e-mail side to be that strong, and without the Twitter interface, I don’t see how it could at all be a useful service. The convenience of the service relied on it being integrated into my daily workflow, as it was showing up in my GMail. Twhirl, my current client, is a great Twitter client, but it’s a window I occasionally check, not something I keep always on top.

So the idea that Twitter may have purchased a business model here (offering the former utility of I Want Sandy and Stikkit) is one that fails, in my opinion. Twitter had already knee-capped the biggest draw to these services, and any attempts to bring back the functionality without IM interface will be fruitless.