4 ms·

Brewster: Hyperconnected Mobile Address Book

35 points by worldvoyageur 14y ago

polyfractal 14y ago
Color me unimpressed. I've found myself degenerating to simpler address books as my online life get's more complex. As a perfect example, the first thing I did when I got a smartphone was hook it up to Facebook. Then I discovered a thousand useless Facebook contacts had been downloaded into my address book. Finding people who I actually wanted to call or text became a nightmare. I recently uninstalled Facebook from my phone because of the whole address book fiasco. I'm back to a simple list of contacts that I know personally - and it's great. I'm probably just being a Luddite. I want an address book so I can quickly call Ted. Not so I can wade through all my Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, <Insert Social Service> friends while attempting to call Ted.
- Karunamon 14y ago
  >As a perfect example, the first thing I did when I got a smartphone was hook it up to Facebook. Then I discovered a thousand useless Facebook contacts had been downloaded into my address book. Finding people who I actually wanted to call or text became a nightmare. That is a feature that can be disabled, for one. For two, every address book platform supports partitioning contacts by category. For instance, i'm a member of the HN G+ circle. Those thousands of contacts don't pollute my usual view because my personal contacts are in another book, which I have set as the default view on my phone.
  - polyfractal 14y ago
    Well, I use a Windows Phone (which I love) but this is one of the features of a WP7 that you can't disable. At least I've been unable to find a way to disable it. So I'll concede that in this scenario it may simply be a failure of the platform and not Facebook/Address Books in general. But I think my core point stands.
    - untog 14y ago
      I used Windows Phone until recently, and I'm almost 100% sure there is an option to change this, because I didn't have the issue myself. All my Facebook contacts were in my address book, but not in the default display. They only appeared when I searched.
      - polyfractal 14y ago
        I guess I'm just incompetent then =) Thanks for the tip, I'll check it out when I get a chance.
    - msh 14y ago
      In the people app you can choose what online accounts to display in the options for the people app.
- wslh 14y ago
  Then, I would like to receive your feedback about a more elaborated concept that I am working on: Egont. The idea is to filter and build your own rules and control your data using a data flow language. Some thoughts on http://blog.databigbang.com/ideas-egont-a-web-orchestration-language/ http://blog.databigbang.com/ideas-egont-a-web-orchestration-... http://blog.databigbang.com/egont-part-ii/ http://blog.databigbang.com/egont-part-ii/
- kulkarnic 14y ago
  As Herb Simon wrote (in 1971!) "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention". The problem you describe is that "smart" address books are actually quite dumb-- they don't understand the context. When you're just trying to call Ted, you don't really care how many mutual friends you have. The solution is actually well-known in the literature for a long time: focus+context (and relatedly overview +details on demand). Show the caller an easy way to get to Ted's number, stat. The rest is just context, which should really only be shown when the user wants to know more about Ted. Side thought: maybe, what would be useful are phones that guess who you want to call. Instead of the "most recent" list on a phone, maybe you want a "most likely to call now".
  - nooneelse 14y ago
    If it has a guess for "most likely to call now", go ahead and give it a "I'm feeling lucky" button. And speaking of Google, they have a "Gesture Search" app that I use all the time to find contacts which I don't think will be on the top of the recent calls list. Usually it doesn't take more than one poorly drawn character at the start of someone's name to have them near the top of the result list. Search, don't sort, and all that.
- untog 14y ago
  This problem already seems to be solved- my Facebook app is set to only sync with existing contacts. Much simpler.
huragok 14y ago
Doesn't seem like the app is available in the AU app store. Looks pretty good though.
- redrory 14y ago
  Or the Jamaican App Store.. why?
olivercameron 14y ago
Our team built a very similar product to Brewster, which shared many of the same features. We discovered a lot of issues with building an iOS address book replacement, and we never launched the product for those reasons. 1) You cannot access the recent calls list. Most people don't use their address book to keep in touch, but rather use their recent calls list. Not being able to access that list means that a huge number of people can't replace the default address book with your product. 2) You cannot be the default. Whenever I make a call, I am kicked back into the built-in Phone.app. This is incredibly confusing for users. 3) It's a momentous performance challenge. When users open the default Phone app, their contacts appear instantaneously. If you want to replace the default, you need to be sure that your address book does whatever it needs to insanely fast. We managed to get the process of syncing an address book down to seconds, but Brewster has unfortunately taken nearly an hour for me. Many, many people will drop out at this point and think the app is broken. 4) It's an enterprise product. Most people's address books are incredibly tiny and include bad data (nicknames, just first names, no names at all), which makes it very hard for a service to provide any type of value add. The only place where you can do an excellent job is for people with thousands of contacts. 5) Privacy concerns. For a product like this to have a great value add, you need to provide the service with a ton of personal data. You need my Facebook, you need my email, you need my address book and much more. Many folks will see this and drop out of the app right then and there. It might be possible to get around these hurdles, but Brewster has a long way to go.
mgkimsal 14y ago
"That's what we are always looking for, someone who just can't sleep because they want to fix something that isn't working in their world and have been trying for a long time to fix it." I'm so mixed on this. I've run in to a number of people who've spent months and sometimes years trying to 'fix something that isn't working in their world', and it's usually because they don't really understand the industry, or how people really work, or they've not investigated the options out there which already exist (or which have already failed). Not saying Brewster necessarily falls in to that camp, and I get that you'd want to fund people with passion, but... sometimes spending a lot of time fixing problems that keep you up at night just... isn't a good use of your time. It's generally only in hindsight that you can make that judgement, but writing this sort of stuff seems to encourage that sort of behaviour.
mdonahoe 14y ago
1. Brewster.com was down for me. 2. The app slurped up all my accounts and then told me to leave.. They would message me when everything was ready. 3. I got a message 20 minutes later. 4. I opened the app and saw a grid of flashing gray blocks. Some blocks had names of my contacts on them. 5. No photos loaded, but the blocks kept flashing. 6. The app asked me to select my favorite contacts. What the hell?! Aren't you supposed to auto magically figure that out? 7. I couldn't find my wife in the giant list. 8. The contacts seemed to be in completely random order. People I had forgotten about were at the top of the list. Maybe the demand spike caused a server failure, but I am disappointed.
- mdonahoe 14y ago
  I tried again today and it seem to work. The wife was at the top of the list this time.
farmerliao 14y ago
Is anyone clear how Brewster plans to monetize? Sorry for asking such a question, but before I sign over my entire contact life to them just curious about why they plan to do with my data. I've read the EULA and its seems pretty typical for a company who plans to sell all my data to some third party.

35 points by worldvoyageur 14y ago

Color me unimpressed. I've found myself degenerating to simpler address books as my online life get's more complex. As a perfect example, the first thing I did when I got a smartphone was hook it up to Facebook. Then I discovered a thousand useless Facebook contacts had been downloaded into my address book. Finding people who I actually wanted to call or text became a nightmare. I recently uninstalled Facebook from my phone because of the whole address book fiasco. I'm back to a simple list of contacts that I know personally - and it's great. I'm probably just being a Luddite. I want an address book so I can quickly call Ted. Not so I can wade through all my Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, <Insert Social Service> friends while attempting to call Ted.

Karunamon 14y ago
>As a perfect example, the first thing I did when I got a smartphone was hook it up to Facebook. Then I discovered a thousand useless Facebook contacts had been downloaded into my address book. Finding people who I actually wanted to call or text became a nightmare. That is a feature that can be disabled, for one. For two, every address book platform supports partitioning contacts by category. For instance, i'm a member of the HN G+ circle. Those thousands of contacts don't pollute my usual view because my personal contacts are in another book, which I have set as the default view on my phone.
- polyfractal 14y ago
  Well, I use a Windows Phone (which I love) but this is one of the features of a WP7 that you can't disable. At least I've been unable to find a way to disable it. So I'll concede that in this scenario it may simply be a failure of the platform and not Facebook/Address Books in general. But I think my core point stands.
  - untog 14y ago
    I used Windows Phone until recently, and I'm almost 100% sure there is an option to change this, because I didn't have the issue myself. All my Facebook contacts were in my address book, but not in the default display. They only appeared when I searched.
    - polyfractal 14y ago
      I guess I'm just incompetent then =) Thanks for the tip, I'll check it out when I get a chance.
  - msh 14y ago
    In the people app you can choose what online accounts to display in the options for the people app.
wslh 14y ago
Then, I would like to receive your feedback about a more elaborated concept that I am working on: Egont. The idea is to filter and build your own rules and control your data using a data flow language. Some thoughts on http://blog.databigbang.com/ideas-egont-a-web-orchestration-language/ http://blog.databigbang.com/ideas-egont-a-web-orchestration-... http://blog.databigbang.com/egont-part-ii/ http://blog.databigbang.com/egont-part-ii/
kulkarnic 14y ago
As Herb Simon wrote (in 1971!) "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention". The problem you describe is that "smart" address books are actually quite dumb-- they don't understand the context. When you're just trying to call Ted, you don't really care how many mutual friends you have. The solution is actually well-known in the literature for a long time: focus+context (and relatedly overview +details on demand). Show the caller an easy way to get to Ted's number, stat. The rest is just context, which should really only be shown when the user wants to know more about Ted. Side thought: maybe, what would be useful are phones that guess who you want to call. Instead of the "most recent" list on a phone, maybe you want a "most likely to call now".
- nooneelse 14y ago
  If it has a guess for "most likely to call now", go ahead and give it a "I'm feeling lucky" button. And speaking of Google, they have a "Gesture Search" app that I use all the time to find contacts which I don't think will be on the top of the recent calls list. Usually it doesn't take more than one poorly drawn character at the start of someone's name to have them near the top of the result list. Search, don't sort, and all that.
untog 14y ago
This problem already seems to be solved- my Facebook app is set to only sync with existing contacts. Much simpler.

huragok 14y ago

Doesn't seem like the app is available in the AU app store. Looks pretty good though.

redrory 14y ago
Or the Jamaican App Store.. why?

olivercameron 14y ago

Our team built a very similar product to Brewster, which shared many of the same features. We discovered a lot of issues with building an iOS address book replacement, and we never launched the product for those reasons. 1) You cannot access the recent calls list. Most people don't use their address book to keep in touch, but rather use their recent calls list. Not being able to access that list means that a huge number of people can't replace the default address book with your product. 2) You cannot be the default. Whenever I make a call, I am kicked back into the built-in Phone.app. This is incredibly confusing for users. 3) It's a momentous performance challenge. When users open the default Phone app, their contacts appear instantaneously. If you want to replace the default, you need to be sure that your address book does whatever it needs to insanely fast. We managed to get the process of syncing an address book down to seconds, but Brewster has unfortunately taken nearly an hour for me. Many, many people will drop out at this point and think the app is broken. 4) It's an enterprise product. Most people's address books are incredibly tiny and include bad data (nicknames, just first names, no names at all), which makes it very hard for a service to provide any type of value add. The only place where you can do an excellent job is for people with thousands of contacts. 5) Privacy concerns. For a product like this to have a great value add, you need to provide the service with a ton of personal data. You need my Facebook, you need my email, you need my address book and much more. Many folks will see this and drop out of the app right then and there. It might be possible to get around these hurdles, but Brewster has a long way to go.

mgkimsal 14y ago

"That's what we are always looking for, someone who just can't sleep because they want to fix something that isn't working in their world and have been trying for a long time to fix it." I'm so mixed on this. I've run in to a number of people who've spent months and sometimes years trying to 'fix something that isn't working in their world', and it's usually because they don't really understand the industry, or how people really work, or they've not investigated the options out there which already exist (or which have already failed). Not saying Brewster necessarily falls in to that camp, and I get that you'd want to fund people with passion, but... sometimes spending a lot of time fixing problems that keep you up at night just... isn't a good use of your time. It's generally only in hindsight that you can make that judgement, but writing this sort of stuff seems to encourage that sort of behaviour.

mdonahoe 14y ago

1. Brewster.com was down for me. 2. The app slurped up all my accounts and then told me to leave.. They would message me when everything was ready. 3. I got a message 20 minutes later. 4. I opened the app and saw a grid of flashing gray blocks. Some blocks had names of my contacts on them. 5. No photos loaded, but the blocks kept flashing. 6. The app asked me to select my favorite contacts. What the hell?! Aren't you supposed to auto magically figure that out? 7. I couldn't find my wife in the giant list. 8. The contacts seemed to be in completely random order. People I had forgotten about were at the top of the list. Maybe the demand spike caused a server failure, but I am disappointed.

mdonahoe 14y ago
I tried again today and it seem to work. The wife was at the top of the list this time.

farmerliao 14y ago

Is anyone clear how Brewster plans to monetize? Sorry for asking such a question, but before I sign over my entire contact life to them just curious about why they plan to do with my data. I've read the EULA and its seems pretty typical for a company who plans to sell all my data to some third party.