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ETacts (YC W10) will help you manage your relationships
- rriepe 17y agoSite looks great. You've got some gradient drop-offs on both the right and left sides. If you can't see it, here's a method I use: Paste a screenshot in photoshop. Hit Ctrl+U and turn the saturation all the way up. Then change the hue so the whole site looks orange or green (the eye tends to blur blue together). You'll more easily notice where the gradients are cut off.
- jfarmer 17y agoHot shit! This was something on my list of things to build for myself. Now I don't have to.
- iamwil 17y agoI thought about this a while back too, but convinced myself not to do it because I didn't think people would admit to using it. And if not, then it couldn't even spread by word of mouth. But it looks like that's not the case.
- stjarnljuset 17y agoA Facebook or Twitter version might be interesting. edit: nevermind, I just saw a comment on Techcrunch that they may add Facebook/Twitter support
- vaksel 17y agowere the screenshots with internal YC emails intentional?
- Frazzydee 17y agoAs far as I can tell, the only internal YC email there is Harj Taggar's, and he has posted it publically before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1138652 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1138652 The other two email addresses visible are the founders'.
- howsta 17y agoAlso Harj's email isn't his real one. The one on the front page is harj@default.net (which is fake)
- Frazzydee 17y agoI think he's talking about the screenshot posted on techcrunch, which shows harj's real email.
- whalesalad 17y agoThe external UI looks like Picwing and Etherpad had a baby.
- whalesalad 17y agoThe internal UI looks a lot like Etherpad too.
- cominatchu 17y agohttp://digital.venturebeat.com/2010/02/22/etacts/ http://digital.venturebeat.com/2010/02/22/etacts/
- jbyers 17y agoI want this very, very badly. But they'd have to pay me a thousand dollars to get me to type my Google password in that box.
- rriepe 17y agoIt's always nice to have a product that would make a killer addition to a Google App. Best of luck to you guys.
- cominatchu 17y agoI'm a co-founder of eTacts. This is a legitimate concern and we do everything we can to address this issue: http://etacts.com/security/ http://etacts.com/security/
- tptacek 17y agoThat's a fine security page (except that it needs to be clear that you're holding on to gmail passwords). But, please remember: if you don't have a security response page, which tells people how to contact you if they find a horrible security problem in your application, they are within our cultural norms to write a very unpleasant blog post about you.
- cominatchu 17y agogood feedback, we will take care of this.
- pchristensen 17y agoThis was the beginning of a similar episode with 37signals (of which tptacek was a vocal contributor): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=803899 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=803899
- jbyers 17y agoWell, I've got good news and bad news. The good news is I want to use your service. If it works the way it looks like it works, I'd pay you to use it. I'm guessing a lot of other people will think the same thing. That's huge! The bad news is that "bank-level" encryption and assertions of good intentions are not sufficient for me to give you my Google password. My Google password is one of two that is not recorded anywhere. The second is for the vault that contains my other 575 passwords. I almost edited my original post to be less melodramatic, but on reflection I think it's right. For a cool grand, I would spend the time to completely separate the associated accounts (analytics, webmaster, docs, calendar, talk, voice) and any password reminders that forward into my gmail now into a separate account. Short of that, I just can't do it. I'm selfishly hopeful that Google gives you a way in without needing to store my password.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- corruption 17y agoI hate to say this, but this would be an ideal addition to "labs" in gmail. I can't imagine it would take much for them to do either.
- moseslee 17y agoThe feeling I get when etacts shows me my most important contacts is like the feeling I get when I see a tag cloud of my tweets. Insightful meta data.
- tptacek 17y ago(Why this is safe) We use the latest in bank-level 256-bit SSL encryption to protect your information, and your passwords are securely encrypted. Etacts will never email your contacts without your permission. Your data is completely private and will not be shared with other users. To help you keep track of who you haven't spoken with, we fetch your email headers. We don't store the content of your emails or attachments. When you view an email in etacts, we fetch the email directly from your Gmail server and don't store it on our servers. Uh. Hey, Etacts. Are you storing my password long term or not? That's my question. Glad you're doing the bank security encrypty thing. But you can't keep my Gmail password.
- cominatchu 17y agowe do keep your gmail password, but you have the ability at any time to delete your gmail password or your entire etacts account. We will try to make this more clear, thank you for the feedback.
- Frazzydee 17y agoJust throwing a thought out there: What about an option that allows people to use etacts without storing their password. So every time a user wants to "refresh" their data, they would have to re-enter their password. The security advantages are limited– the password has to go through you guys either way– but there may be a difference psychologically. I don't think mail2web would be as widely-used if they didn't have a policy against storing passwords.
- cominatchu 17y agothis is a good idea, we'll talk to our users and see if this is a wanted feature.
- tptacek 17y agoIt won't be. Don't bother. You can't convince people like me to give you a gmail password. It's simply not going to happen. Meanwhile, you could convince my mom to give up her gmail password with an animated GIF of a cartoon padlock. What we can help you with here is how to communicate about security without setting off alarm bells. Your security page isn't awful; "bank security" is a security idiom, it's fine that you use it. But we can help you make it better. Make it clear that you're storing passwords so nobody can say they're surprised about, and make sure security researchers know how to contact you.
- JeffJenkins 17y agoI thought about writing something to do this a few years ago. The issue which I ran into that always stopped me from doing it is that you need to integrate every medium a person uses for it to be really useful. I also suspect that outside of business contacts I view lack of communication with someone as a signal that I'm not that interested in talking to them.
- ruchi 17y agoExactly, since email is not the only mode of online communication this isn't all encompassing.
- jfarmer 17y agoThat's just an excuse to quit. So you start with email. Email is the baseline. The important thing is to have a clear vision and start building shit. If it's really important to integrate other services, you can do that later. (I don't think it is, personally. At least not for the kind of people who would pay you money.)
- JeffJenkins 17y agoAt the time -- this was like 5-7 years ago -- I wasn't terribly interested in startups and doing school work or hanging out with my friends probably seemed like a better use of my time. I actually solved a lot of that problem on a later project where I needed to write parsers for the log formats of a bunch of IM/IRC clients, but now I really am not interested in getting reminders about who I haven't talked to. What this sort of thing does really bring home for me is that in terms of trying to do a startup through y-combinator I should probably ignore whether I believe there is a market for something as long as I think some people would find it useful.
- joshu 17y agoI love the idea of this. Can't wait to see more. I also wish it didn't have to store my password.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- jayair 17y agoI think its a good idea; instead of going after email overload as a whole, go after a sub problem that it creates. Please, fix the lander. It looks way too close to http://www.getballpark.com/ http://www.getballpark.com/ but only worse. If the metalab guys haven't tweeted about it yet, they definitely will. If you need some tips about it just send me a note jay (at) anomalyinnovations.com.
- vaksel 17y agoforget looking too close...it is it...that's a 1 to 1 copy of their template
- jayair 17y agoYeah and it should be changed soon. @ETacts Again if you need any help let me know.
- chintan 17y agoAnd we know where the MOTHER SOURCE TEMPLATE resides: http://basecamphq.com/ http://basecamphq.com/
- Timothee 17y agoYou can't call this a 1-to-1 copy. Sure, when you look at them side by side, they have a lot of elements in common and use a similar color scheme. But for the most part these elements are common to a lot of websites in general. (e.g. Lighthouse by entp, or http://www.campaignmonitor.com/ http://www.campaignmonitor.com/ and many more) Visual Website Optimizer was a 1-to-1 copy of Basecamp to the point where they were actually using the exact background image. But I'd say that at most Etacts was inspired by the general style of many websites/web-apps rather than Metalab in particular. However, I had never looked at Basecamp vs. Ballpark (though I could tell that they both follow the same trends) and if Metalab were to call Etacts out for their design as jayair suggests, I'd like to hear Metalab's explanation for the copy of Basecamp's design and copy. "The Better Way To Get Projects Done" => "The Better Way To Get Paid"; "See Plans and Pricing/30-day free trial, sign up in 60 seconds" => "See Plans and Pricing/30-day Free Trial. Get started in 60 seconds." Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that Metalab does have a distinct style in a lot of their designs (they seem to love text-shadows for example) but they're not the inventors of it either. The layout is pretty common place nowadays. (or as lunaru put it about a year ago when Ballpark came out: "the layout is pretty much a de facto standard" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=557277 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=557277)
- shawndrost 17y agoFeedback: when I log in for the first time, I don't really have any prompts, and I'm not sure what I should do, or why I should do it. I'm thinking something like "Do you want to email XXX -- you used to talk to them a lot, and it's been a while." If you can help me along the path from "I just signed in" to "ETacts just helped me!", that would be awesome.
- Goosey 17y agoI love this idea, but it doesn't seem to handle Unicode properly. All my contacts written in Hangul show up like "=?Euc-Kr?B?Sejh/Ly3?=" :(
- cominatchu 17y agowe will fix this asap
- param 17y agoare you interested in selling a stand-alone server license?
- cominatchu 17y agoyes, this is something we are considering. it depends on the demand for something like that.
- param 17y agoplease reach out to me when you are ready to discuss. My email is in the profile Note - we are a company that hosts email on google apps. However, we can not and will not use this service through your website. However, something that we can host ourselves, and includes pricing that is friendly to small companies will be eagerly looked at.
- rrikhy 17y agoPrecisely what i've been looking for. Thought Gist was a solution. They got it wrong, you guys got it right.Was actually planning on building this for myself. I hate feature creep too, but important: 1. Company pages for company e-mails 2. Merging contacts 3. how to smartly import facebook and linkedin like gist does i.e. keep the people with companies, chuck the rest. 4. Updating/removing accounts etc needs some QA
- aviel 17y agoGist.com?
- jfarmer 17y agoSmall product nit: I think you weight older messages too highly. #1 on my list is my girlfriend (cool). #2 is my co-founder from my last company (also cool). #3 is my dad. #4 is my ex-girlfriend, and it's telling me to email her (fail).
- adamsmith 17y agoWe originally had this feature in Xobni. We informally called it the ex girlfriend finder because those tend to be the people you used to communicate with a ton but not recently.
- tsally 17y agoA lot of people are expressing concern about having to give you their Gmail password. Have you considered implementing an offline scanner for desktop clients that would then upload the contact and frequency information to your severs through SSL? You could then overlay your services in Thunderbird's/Outlook's/Mail's desktop interfaces. That kind of kills the convenience of the service, but personally I would accept that for increased security.
- ashishbharthi 17y agoAwesome is the word I would use to describe it. And it reassured me that the people I think should be important to me are the people important to me.
- natep 17y agoWow! I've been meaning to do something like this for a while, but way more useful than what I was going to do. What I had in mind was just a Google Reader Trends but for email (showing you when you received/read email by day, time of day, day of week, etc visually). Having graphs in etacts would be nice, but I think you nailed the really important features! Now I just have to wait for the solution to the password problem. A desktop application, while less convenient than a web app, would still be awesome, and could even be made a portable install I take around on a USB stick.
- keeptrying 17y agoThis is a very useful feature but I dont think it'll work as a standalone product. I'm guessing they are probably targeting gmail first so that they get bought out by Google if they get a ton of users.
- albertcardona 17y agoFacebook is doing this already, and gmail can add it in no time. Not a good prospect for ETacts.
- mhansen 17y agoWhere is facebook doing this? I haven't seen it
- jgrahamc 17y agoFacebook frequently suggests to me people I haven't been in contact with for a while.
- albertcardona 17y agoIt's a box on the upper right side of the screen, with words such as "Reconnect to" or "Send a message to". All to friends one hasn't contacted in a while.
- lionhearted 17y agoHey guys, I had an idea for a work-around for you for people who don't want to give their password. What if BCCing myaccount@etacts.com updated your info? Doesn't seem like it'd be hard to implement. I'd use the service if it had that feature, it looks really good. I think you guys are doing something really needed and cool, cheers and good luck, Sebastian
- kirpekar 17y agoDid not work for me. Took 10+ minutes to load the People tab. Then showed only 1 contact. I had emailed this contact last year to sell something.
- kbrower 17y agoGmail made me change my password due to suspicious activity