12 ms·

I was thinking about something similar, but less cringy. More like: hey you haven't messaged your friend in 6 months, maybe you should ask them how they are do

I was thinking about something similar, but less cringy. More like: hey you haven't messaged your friend in 6 months, maybe you should ask them how they are doing. A priority queue but to help keep friendships alive.

itsthejb 4y ago
https://github.com/monicahq/monica https://github.com/monicahq/monica
umeshunni 4y ago
A personal CRM
rsstack 4y ago
Not 100% what you describe, but functionally the same: https://github.com/monicahq/monica https://github.com/monicahq/monica
- scrollaway 4y ago
  Monica is an excellent "Personal CRM" as people are describing. It strives to achieve exactly the goals GP describes. Personally, I would just like to see a contacts app that doesn't suck, and actually supports having both "companies" AND "people" as contact without treating them exactly the same. If I want to call some hotel or something, why does it have to be "First name: Holiday Inn" in order to even show up correctly...
  - count 4y ago
    MacOS/iOS Contacts supports this, for what it's worth. You can enter a 'Company Name' and leave fname/lname blank, and it'll give it a different default icon, as well as show it as the company name in lists/sorts.
    - zvr 4y ago
      The same in Android Contacts and GMail Contacts.
BowBun 4y ago
There's been a few of these since the topic has come up regularly in the last few years - * https://keepmyfriends.com/ https://keepmyfriends.com/ * https://getdex.com/ https://getdex.com/ I haven't used any personally!
kybernetikos 4y ago
I remember moaning about twitter reducing the number of characters people sent, and then yo! came out, and it was down to a single bit of data. That made me think 'what would even lower information content messages look like in a social network, perhaps half a bit or even less?'. I figured that a half bit of data would be where a social network sent some sort of hello message automatically with the same frequency the human user sent one manually, so given a message, it'd be 50/50 whether it was sent automatically or manually. Although I got to it theoretically, in the end, I thought it could be pretty useful practically, as a way of sparking conversations again when you haven't spoken to someone in a while, etc. Maybe combined with ChatGPT we could even make those automatic getting-back-in-touch messages indistinguishable from the manual ones.
- calt 4y ago
  > Half a bit of data I’ve never heard that idea before and I love it.
  - scrumper 4y ago
    Half a bit... yeah. I read a good description of a bit (I think in The Information by James Gleick) as "a yes or no answer to a single unambiguous question. I'm misremembering the quote but that's close enough. So half a bit would be like hearing "Umm..." in response to that same question?
    - LodeOfCode 4y ago
      I think "Umm..." would be zero bits, and half a bit would be more like "Probably"/"Probably not"
      - scrumper 4y ago
        "Probably" is more than one bit, not less, no? It conveys both uncertainty and an opinion on the answer. "Is this tree deciduous?" "Yes" - one bit "Is this tree evergreen?" "Probably" - one bit (they don't know), another bit (their guess) But I'm way off any formal understanding of this, and it can be rigorously defined. Meta comment: "half a bit" was clearly a joke, and so was my response; now I'm taking your reply at face value and debating it seriously, while admitting that I haven't got anything close to firm enough ground under me to actually debate it :)
npunt 4y ago
Lots of attempts over the years at this personal crm problem space but no success to date. I did one on Facebook platform in 2008-09 called Socialfly, our tagline was ‘be twice the friend in half the time’. Problem is there’s a lot of input and upkeep which limits appeal, the most important social data sources (text & phone) are not accessible via api, its a personal tool that you don’t necessarily want to tell others you use which limits distribution & scale, and even after all that in general it’s hard to scale personal authenticity. I think the problem needs to be approached from a different angle along the lines of a personal assistant rather that an explicit data management tool. And it likely has to come from those with access to privileged social data sources like Apple or Google or Facebook.
- michaelmior 4y ago
  I remember using Socialfly! I wasn't a heavy user, but I actually quite liked it and was a bit disappointed when it went away.
  - npunt 4y ago
    Oh cool, so great to hear from a user after all these years! Some of our users were suuper invested, like keeping up with hundreds of people - far more than we anticipated. I think our top user was a pastor in Australia who kept up with like 700+ people. We would have continued a while longer but the 08 recession really burnt us. We were raising $$ in the weeks where banks were literally failing. RIP Good Times era. Our iPhone app was just about ready to ship and we were going to start building integrations like email next, but no runway. We had an angel lined up who’d have gotten us about 4-6mo of runway but I didn’t want to burn that relationship in such an uncertain environment, we were all pretty down about prospects then. Fun fact tho: the app continued to work for years after. FB took a long time to deprecate API and our code was pretty solid.
- jxramos 4y ago
  Would accompany count? https://www.accompany.com/ https://www.accompany.com/ not really personal, I believe it's business oriented.
omarhaneef 4y ago
There have been several iterations of this sort of idea — a personal CRM — and the main issue I have is they should automatically scan my emails, texts and chats to figure out my friends and suggest that I reach out. Also, want it to be 100% local and privacy first.
- lordnacho 4y ago
  > Also, want it to be 100% local and privacy first. But I also want an AI personal assistant to know what to write to everyone, what we last did, what would they be interested in, and so on.
- vageli 4y ago
  Something like monica may interest you to scratch the personal CRM itch. https://github.com/monicahq/monica https://github.com/monicahq/monica
  - JadoJodo 4y ago
    I loved the idea of this until I realized the amount of PII I was collecting of friends and family in one place that could be hacked.
    - DenisM 4y ago
      Yeah, I entered exactly one contact before I realized this. There’s also the problem of entering unflattering details, and subsequently leaking them out. The search continues.
- derefr 4y ago
  > should automatically scan my emails, texts and chats Great, easy to integrate one service with the APIs of a bunch of others! > Also, want it to be 100% local and privacy first. ...but in combination? Never going to happen. Ask yourself: who's signing up for the API keys to enable the client-side service to talk to all these services? Is it the end-user, or is it this software's developer? If it's the software's developer, then they're effectively leaking all these API keys by embedding them into the software itself — where not just the end users, but anyone else could come along and reuse these keys for anything they like. The service providers will find this out, and block these keys. (No, you can't avoid this by proxying requests to some gateway, operated by the service-provider, that holds the API keys. Then you lose the "local/private" aspect.) If it's each end-user, then the aggregate traffic from all the instances of this app running at once, will look exactly like a bot that's trying to evade API rate-limits using a "residential proxy cluster" like https://www.zyte.com/smart-proxy-manager/ https://www.zyte.com/smart-proxy-manager/... and so the services will block these keys. --- Mind you, in theory, you could do this on the OS level, using OS accessibility APIs to effectively "read" the messages off the screen. But 1. is there any third-party ISV — who isn't a certified accessibility-software provider — who you'd trust enough to allow their software the ability to constantly "read" everything on your screen? That includes your passwords, you know! And also, 2., the messages need to be on the screen for accessibility software to read them. An accessibility-API-driven CRM can't load your chat history unless you also grant it the ability to literally take your mouse and scroll through it for you. Or, alternately, coming at this from the perspective of the Operating System vendor themselves, you could do this "in" the OS, by forcing emails/text/chat message handling to go through system APIs that can see these as special document types, and so do things with them. IIRC there was at least one pre-iPhone mobile OS that did this (BlackBerry OS, maybe?), enabling all of these types of messaging-app traffic to be muxed together into a single first-party app that did indeed manage all conversations with your contacts in a multi-channel way.
gjsman-1000 4y ago
> I was thinking about something similar, but less cringy. Well, if you are worried about it being cringy, you probably shouldn't watch the 2022 Salesforce Dreamforce (their annual convention). It's cultish and shows the unbelievably arrogant confidence they have in their own importance - along with the most inexplicably childish moments for a professional conference I've ever seen. (Let's put foam rabbit ears on our "co-CEOs" to entertain the "trailblazers" as we gather around a fake wooden stage imitating the outdoors with faux trees, won't that be funny?)
throwaway29812 4y ago
This combined with the only useful feature FB had for years (people's birthday). Integrate a scraping and keyword search for public facing social media postings to alert to people in distress, perhaps. Or just a general "you should check on X" feature. Not with automated messaging, that's too much.
ThouYS 4y ago
sounds like henlo to me: https://henlo.app/ https://henlo.app/
nextaccountic 4y ago
> hey you haven't messaged your friend in 6 months, maybe you should ask them how they are doing. A priority queue but to help keep friendships alive. This is what social media and messaging apps should innovate on. But, without VC money, without ads, without feeds drive by algorithms that optimize for engagement. Without dark patterns and antifeatures that make our lives worse. Just a non-profit that churns out open source code and is supported by monthly recurring donations from a % of the userbase.
adrianmonk 4y ago
I want one for remembering stuff about people for personal and business networking. For a while, I was going to a weekly event where I'd meet people, but I'd never remember their name next time because I'm terrible with names. So I started jotting down notes after it was over. Like, today I met person X who is really into this one hobby and just moved here from such and such city. And person Y who is looking for a new apartment. And Z who came with Y. Then before going next time, I'd review the list, and if I saw X, I knew their name and could ask how they're adjusting after their move. Or I could ask Y how the apartment search is going. At first I thought if people saw this list they might think it was a little weird. And maybe, but I'm OK with it since it's a way of making an effort. As long as it's genuine and your motivations are good, people like that you remembered stuff about them. (I'm not doing it to impress people, etc.) Anyway, I didn't have a good way to organize it. I stuck it all in a document, which didn't work great.
- chuckwalter 4y ago
  I've been building FriendApp the past year. The core feature on iPhone right now is to just group people into lists, and preserve messaging integration with whatsapp, text etc. Trying to make it super simple. Also has ability to sync for recent contacts list. Would love feedback, and thoughts on the next features to iterate on. https://www.friendapp.com/ https://www.friendapp.com/
darcys22 4y ago
I've found just setting a recurring TODO in the calendar to "Call XXX" is sufficient.
- applejacks 4y ago
  I signed up for https://infrequent.app/ https://infrequent.app/ when it was a Show HN just to try it out and it actually worked (probably about as well as a "non-busy" TODO in my calendar app with an alert). Enough to remind me to call 1 or 2 people that I like to talk to but often leave for too long, anyway.
gwern 4y ago
I've thought about similar problems like rewatching your favorite movie, and concluded that treating it as a priority queue or trying to watch it every _n_ days is the wrong approach; you want to instead be reminded when you've forgotten about your friend Alex or what _The Leopard_ is about, so you can then ping them & catch up or rewatch that movie with a near-fresh mind. (If you ping Alex while you remember them, then maybe there's another actually-forgotten friend you could've pinged instead who would be more valuable to get back in touch with.) It is, in other words, the exact opposite of 'spaced repetition', where you want to review right before forgetting to strengthen the memory the most; in this use-case, 'anti-spaced repetition', you want to review only after you've forgotten it. (https://www.gwern.net/Statistical-notes#program-for-non-spaced-repetition-review-of-past-written-materials-for-serendipity-rediscovery-archive-revisiter https://www.gwern.net/Statistical-notes#program-for-non-spac...)
chuckwalter 4y ago
This is where I'd like to go with FriendApp. Would love if you wanted to check out where we are right now with our iPhone app. https://www.friendapp.com/ https://www.friendapp.com/
xeromal 4y ago
A person on reddit actually made this app and it worked pretty well. I can't remember the name of it for the life of me.
- arthurcolle 4y ago
  you might be thinking of Monica? I seem to remember that coming out of reddit a while back, could be wrong
i-dont-remember 4y ago
I've seen a couple tools pop up around this idea. Haven't explored them much, but: - MonicaHQ (open-source) - Dex (free version seems good enough for most people, i'm trying this one out rn) getdex.com/ - Custom system in Airtable - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30329475 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30329475 - Infrequent app - blog post talks more about it, linked in comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33308084 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33308084

itsthejb 4y ago

https://github.com/monicahq/monica https://github.com/monicahq/monica

umeshunni 4y ago

A personal CRM

rsstack 4y ago

Not 100% what you describe, but functionally the same: https://github.com/monicahq/monica https://github.com/monicahq/monica

scrollaway 4y ago
Monica is an excellent "Personal CRM" as people are describing. It strives to achieve exactly the goals GP describes. Personally, I would just like to see a contacts app that doesn't suck, and actually supports having both "companies" AND "people" as contact without treating them exactly the same. If I want to call some hotel or something, why does it have to be "First name: Holiday Inn" in order to even show up correctly...
- count 4y ago
  MacOS/iOS Contacts supports this, for what it's worth. You can enter a 'Company Name' and leave fname/lname blank, and it'll give it a different default icon, as well as show it as the company name in lists/sorts.
  - zvr 4y ago
    The same in Android Contacts and GMail Contacts.

BowBun 4y ago

There's been a few of these since the topic has come up regularly in the last few years - * https://keepmyfriends.com/ https://keepmyfriends.com/ * https://getdex.com/ https://getdex.com/ I haven't used any personally!

kybernetikos 4y ago

I remember moaning about twitter reducing the number of characters people sent, and then yo! came out, and it was down to a single bit of data. That made me think 'what would even lower information content messages look like in a social network, perhaps half a bit or even less?'. I figured that a half bit of data would be where a social network sent some sort of hello message automatically with the same frequency the human user sent one manually, so given a message, it'd be 50/50 whether it was sent automatically or manually. Although I got to it theoretically, in the end, I thought it could be pretty useful practically, as a way of sparking conversations again when you haven't spoken to someone in a while, etc. Maybe combined with ChatGPT we could even make those automatic getting-back-in-touch messages indistinguishable from the manual ones.

calt 4y ago
> Half a bit of data I’ve never heard that idea before and I love it.
- scrumper 4y ago
  Half a bit... yeah. I read a good description of a bit (I think in The Information by James Gleick) as "a yes or no answer to a single unambiguous question. I'm misremembering the quote but that's close enough. So half a bit would be like hearing "Umm..." in response to that same question?
  - LodeOfCode 4y ago
    I think "Umm..." would be zero bits, and half a bit would be more like "Probably"/"Probably not"
    - scrumper 4y ago
      "Probably" is more than one bit, not less, no? It conveys both uncertainty and an opinion on the answer. "Is this tree deciduous?" "Yes" - one bit "Is this tree evergreen?" "Probably" - one bit (they don't know), another bit (their guess) But I'm way off any formal understanding of this, and it can be rigorously defined. Meta comment: "half a bit" was clearly a joke, and so was my response; now I'm taking your reply at face value and debating it seriously, while admitting that I haven't got anything close to firm enough ground under me to actually debate it :)

npunt 4y ago

Lots of attempts over the years at this personal crm problem space but no success to date. I did one on Facebook platform in 2008-09 called Socialfly, our tagline was ‘be twice the friend in half the time’. Problem is there’s a lot of input and upkeep which limits appeal, the most important social data sources (text & phone) are not accessible via api, its a personal tool that you don’t necessarily want to tell others you use which limits distribution & scale, and even after all that in general it’s hard to scale personal authenticity. I think the problem needs to be approached from a different angle along the lines of a personal assistant rather that an explicit data management tool. And it likely has to come from those with access to privileged social data sources like Apple or Google or Facebook.

michaelmior 4y ago
I remember using Socialfly! I wasn't a heavy user, but I actually quite liked it and was a bit disappointed when it went away.
- npunt 4y ago
  Oh cool, so great to hear from a user after all these years! Some of our users were suuper invested, like keeping up with hundreds of people - far more than we anticipated. I think our top user was a pastor in Australia who kept up with like 700+ people. We would have continued a while longer but the 08 recession really burnt us. We were raising $$ in the weeks where banks were literally failing. RIP Good Times era. Our iPhone app was just about ready to ship and we were going to start building integrations like email next, but no runway. We had an angel lined up who’d have gotten us about 4-6mo of runway but I didn’t want to burn that relationship in such an uncertain environment, we were all pretty down about prospects then. Fun fact tho: the app continued to work for years after. FB took a long time to deprecate API and our code was pretty solid.
jxramos 4y ago
Would accompany count? https://www.accompany.com/ https://www.accompany.com/ not really personal, I believe it's business oriented.

omarhaneef 4y ago

There have been several iterations of this sort of idea — a personal CRM — and the main issue I have is they should automatically scan my emails, texts and chats to figure out my friends and suggest that I reach out. Also, want it to be 100% local and privacy first.

lordnacho 4y ago
> Also, want it to be 100% local and privacy first. But I also want an AI personal assistant to know what to write to everyone, what we last did, what would they be interested in, and so on.
vageli 4y ago
Something like monica may interest you to scratch the personal CRM itch. https://github.com/monicahq/monica https://github.com/monicahq/monica
- JadoJodo 4y ago
  I loved the idea of this until I realized the amount of PII I was collecting of friends and family in one place that could be hacked.
  - DenisM 4y ago
    Yeah, I entered exactly one contact before I realized this. There’s also the problem of entering unflattering details, and subsequently leaking them out. The search continues.
derefr 4y ago
> should automatically scan my emails, texts and chats Great, easy to integrate one service with the APIs of a bunch of others! > Also, want it to be 100% local and privacy first. ...but in combination? Never going to happen. Ask yourself: who's signing up for the API keys to enable the client-side service to talk to all these services? Is it the end-user, or is it this software's developer? If it's the software's developer, then they're effectively leaking all these API keys by embedding them into the software itself — where not just the end users, but anyone else could come along and reuse these keys for anything they like. The service providers will find this out, and block these keys. (No, you can't avoid this by proxying requests to some gateway, operated by the service-provider, that holds the API keys. Then you lose the "local/private" aspect.) If it's each end-user, then the aggregate traffic from all the instances of this app running at once, will look exactly like a bot that's trying to evade API rate-limits using a "residential proxy cluster" like https://www.zyte.com/smart-proxy-manager/ https://www.zyte.com/smart-proxy-manager/... and so the services will block these keys. --- Mind you, in theory, you could do this on the OS level, using OS accessibility APIs to effectively "read" the messages off the screen. But 1. is there any third-party ISV — who isn't a certified accessibility-software provider — who you'd trust enough to allow their software the ability to constantly "read" everything on your screen? That includes your passwords, you know! And also, 2., the messages need to be on the screen for accessibility software to read them. An accessibility-API-driven CRM can't load your chat history unless you also grant it the ability to literally take your mouse and scroll through it for you. Or, alternately, coming at this from the perspective of the Operating System vendor themselves, you could do this "in" the OS, by forcing emails/text/chat message handling to go through system APIs that can see these as special document types, and so do things with them. IIRC there was at least one pre-iPhone mobile OS that did this (BlackBerry OS, maybe?), enabling all of these types of messaging-app traffic to be muxed together into a single first-party app that did indeed manage all conversations with your contacts in a multi-channel way.

gjsman-1000 4y ago

> I was thinking about something similar, but less cringy. Well, if you are worried about it being cringy, you probably shouldn't watch the 2022 Salesforce Dreamforce (their annual convention). It's cultish and shows the unbelievably arrogant confidence they have in their own importance - along with the most inexplicably childish moments for a professional conference I've ever seen. (Let's put foam rabbit ears on our "co-CEOs" to entertain the "trailblazers" as we gather around a fake wooden stage imitating the outdoors with faux trees, won't that be funny?)

throwaway29812 4y ago

This combined with the only useful feature FB had for years (people's birthday). Integrate a scraping and keyword search for public facing social media postings to alert to people in distress, perhaps. Or just a general "you should check on X" feature. Not with automated messaging, that's too much.

ThouYS 4y ago

sounds like henlo to me: https://henlo.app/ https://henlo.app/

nextaccountic 4y ago

> hey you haven't messaged your friend in 6 months, maybe you should ask them how they are doing. A priority queue but to help keep friendships alive. This is what social media and messaging apps should innovate on. But, without VC money, without ads, without feeds drive by algorithms that optimize for engagement. Without dark patterns and antifeatures that make our lives worse. Just a non-profit that churns out open source code and is supported by monthly recurring donations from a % of the userbase.

adrianmonk 4y ago

I want one for remembering stuff about people for personal and business networking. For a while, I was going to a weekly event where I'd meet people, but I'd never remember their name next time because I'm terrible with names. So I started jotting down notes after it was over. Like, today I met person X who is really into this one hobby and just moved here from such and such city. And person Y who is looking for a new apartment. And Z who came with Y. Then before going next time, I'd review the list, and if I saw X, I knew their name and could ask how they're adjusting after their move. Or I could ask Y how the apartment search is going. At first I thought if people saw this list they might think it was a little weird. And maybe, but I'm OK with it since it's a way of making an effort. As long as it's genuine and your motivations are good, people like that you remembered stuff about them. (I'm not doing it to impress people, etc.) Anyway, I didn't have a good way to organize it. I stuck it all in a document, which didn't work great.

chuckwalter 4y ago
I've been building FriendApp the past year. The core feature on iPhone right now is to just group people into lists, and preserve messaging integration with whatsapp, text etc. Trying to make it super simple. Also has ability to sync for recent contacts list. Would love feedback, and thoughts on the next features to iterate on. https://www.friendapp.com/ https://www.friendapp.com/

darcys22 4y ago

I've found just setting a recurring TODO in the calendar to "Call XXX" is sufficient.

applejacks 4y ago
I signed up for https://infrequent.app/ https://infrequent.app/ when it was a Show HN just to try it out and it actually worked (probably about as well as a "non-busy" TODO in my calendar app with an alert). Enough to remind me to call 1 or 2 people that I like to talk to but often leave for too long, anyway.

gwern 4y ago

I've thought about similar problems like rewatching your favorite movie, and concluded that treating it as a priority queue or trying to watch it every _n_ days is the wrong approach; you want to instead be reminded when you've forgotten about your friend Alex or what _The Leopard_ is about, so you can then ping them & catch up or rewatch that movie with a near-fresh mind. (If you ping Alex while you remember them, then maybe there's another actually-forgotten friend you could've pinged instead who would be more valuable to get back in touch with.) It is, in other words, the exact opposite of 'spaced repetition', where you want to review right before forgetting to strengthen the memory the most; in this use-case, 'anti-spaced repetition', you want to review only after you've forgotten it. (https://www.gwern.net/Statistical-notes#program-for-non-spaced-repetition-review-of-past-written-materials-for-serendipity-rediscovery-archive-revisiter https://www.gwern.net/Statistical-notes#program-for-non-spac...)

chuckwalter 4y ago

This is where I'd like to go with FriendApp. Would love if you wanted to check out where we are right now with our iPhone app. https://www.friendapp.com/ https://www.friendapp.com/

xeromal 4y ago

A person on reddit actually made this app and it worked pretty well. I can't remember the name of it for the life of me.

arthurcolle 4y ago
you might be thinking of Monica? I seem to remember that coming out of reddit a while back, could be wrong

i-dont-remember 4y ago

I've seen a couple tools pop up around this idea. Haven't explored them much, but: - MonicaHQ (open-source) - Dex (free version seems good enough for most people, i'm trying this one out rn) getdex.com/ - Custom system in Airtable - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30329475 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30329475 - Infrequent app - blog post talks more about it, linked in comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33308084 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33308084