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Matt Cutts gives you a free startup idea
- Matt_Cutts 16y agoWith this kind of positive feedback, maybe I'll post more in the future.
- zavulon 16y agoEveryone's too busy frantically implementing this, wanting to be the first :)
- metamemetics 16y agointra-webapp communication : HTML :: inter-webapp communication : GMAIL ?
- sown 16y agoI wasn't aware that gmail had an API that would allow me to parse mail like he wants. Is it supposed to be a greasmonkey script+server side stuff>?
- vampirical 16y agoTheir OAuth for IMAP/SMTP should be all you need: http://code.google.com/apis/gmail/oauth/ http://code.google.com/apis/gmail/oauth/
- sown 16y agoI learn something new every day. Thanks for that!
- AlexBlom 16y ago*waiting 6 months for all of the 'review my startup' threads
- lachyg 16y agoYou'd hope someone could have an MVP up within a week or two!
- vaksel 16y agothis should probably just get paired with an email parser, as in you setup a filter, and tell it what piece of data to look for, and that's the only data that's made available. i dunno about others, but I wouldn't want some third party site to get the full email with my name/address for example.
- dstein 16y agoExcept I think startups are collectively figuring out that creating a company solely around an API plugin isn't a very solid business plan.
- qeorge 16y agoNot sure that applies here. Even if Gmail discountinued OAuth support, you could just fall back to IMAP.
- wavesplash 16y agoAs the ecosystem around Twitter has discovered, the platform owners will sooner copy a good feature than buy it if it's cheap enough to build. It's not about OAuth or IMAP, it's about some GOOG PM copying the featureset and putting it in the MRD for the next release. [edit: a famous bit of company-is-a-feature carnage for reference: STAC vs. Microsoft: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics ] Which makes me wonder why Matt can't get this championed internally or for someone's 20% project?
- ojbyrne 16y agoTwitter has actually made 4 acquisitions. Perhaps they were talent acquisitions but the still apply. I suspect that they have a buy/build strategy of some kind - i.e. could we build this product faster than the people who built it? If not, we want them on our team.
- fauigerzigerk 16y agoI think that depends on how sophisticated a service is. I agree that applying some regular expressions to emails is not enough to make any other company buy you instead of building it themselves. But that holds for almost anything a startup can do. Startups need to solve difficult problems or they are nothing more than marketing firms trying to create a hype around hot air. Filtering email intelligently, including automatic anonymization of sensitive parts within the email, can be a difficult problem to solve, and I think there are many types of email integration that a startup could tackle based on the approach Matt suggests.
- auxbuss 16y agoI think we're in Diaspora territory again, where I want to own the data and allow access to you via my own criteria. I've been baulking at Firefox 4's "sync" today because the data is on their server with their key. A bit 1990's me thinks. There's no way I'm trusting my email, or anyone else's, to another third party. I imagine I manage this like most folk, I forward gmail to my server and procmail from there. Works great.
- mgunes 16y agoFirefox Sync encrypts the data locally, and you can run your own server. There's actually a simplified one for running on your own home server (as opposed to the large Mozilla infrastructure).
- pbiggar 16y agoIn addition, the server and all infrastructure, are completely open source. Mozilla doesn't really build anything that it can't open source.
- patio11 16y agoI think you either define "most" differently than I do or you may benefit from speaking to nontechnical people about their computer usage. Keywords that may be appropriate: the Google Hotmail.
- ronnier 16y agoSeems like a neat idea, but I'd rather that functionality be handled by gmail rather than a 3rd party.
- Timothee 16y agoIt sounds like it should be handled by Gmail in their OAuth access implementation. As described in the post, it sounds kind of scary that by giving access to Gmail, you give access to all your account with no granularity whatsoever. Gmail could do that by pairing the OAuth access with a set of permissions which would basically be the filters Matt describes. The way other services (Facebook comes to mind) are doing it basically.
- minalecs 16y agoagree, as much as I love the idea, theres no way I want to allow anyone other than google to have access to my email. They would essentially be able to mine.. all my bills, expenses, and income, all my contacts and plans.. etc pretty much have access to my entire life.. yes I know google does, but giving it to google is much better than giving it to some startup who may not be around a year from now, and decide to sell all this data to the highest bidder, and who knows where else that will go.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- aneth 16y agoOtherinbox is on this track. They can create calendar entries automatically from emails. I stopped using them because I didn't like the opt-out style of filtering, but the technology is cool.
- volodia 16y agoMaybe I didn't understand something, but it seems to me that companies like Blippy would have to change something in their code to link with your server instead of Gmail. If it's the case, it would be hard to get everyone to adopt this system. Or if it's not the case, could someone explain to me how linking the startup server with other companies would work? (Unfortunately, I'm not very familiar with the technologies mentioned in the article.)
- scharan 16y agoNot sure if its a great business plan, but its something that I have been looking around for quite sometime now. Very useful idea!
- yef 16y agoHow much money does procmail make?
- eduardo_f 16y agoI have the oauth stuff already working in my app (different app, using php and ruby). I can help get this done (or a similar idea) very quickly. Get in touch with me if interested (email in profile).