I have over 600 contacts on my iPhone and it is a complete nightmare.
The fact that smart phones do not intelligently dial numbers based on where you are in the world is absurd (eg: prepend dialing code!!)
The fact I have numerous contacts of the same people, each with different details (eg: two direct contacts named Oliver Cameron, one with an email, one with a mobile phone number) and then the iPhone never telling you which is which when you need to sms/email.
I would also love smart contact groups, like extract all the contacts with only email addresses, so that every time I wish to dial or sms a contact, I can only select actually useful ones. And so on.
> ... intelligently dial numbers based on where you are in the world ...
I lived abroad for a year. The pain of manually adding '+44' to every contact in my addressbook (directly on my non-smartphone) meant that I've only used international numbers ever since.
Hey guys, founder of Everyme here. As for why this is different than a contact list, imagine if your address book was kept accurate and up-to-date magically. If a friend changes their phone number, why should your address book get out of date?
Couple that with having everything about your contacts at your fingertips (posts, messages, profiles), awesome automatic grouping, syncing to everywhere, and you have a completely new address book.
This sounds really interesting and I'm looking forward to seeing what you've got. Had several conversations with people about contact management and address books in the past and I expect you've had similar discussions. I'm curious to know your opinions.
One of the discussions I had revolved around ownership of data and there were basically two points of view, both perfectly valid.
The first PoV was that an owner/curator sees the address book as theirs and if they add someone's details to it, those details should remain until the owner/curator decides to remove them. The second PoV was that someone should be able to 'grant access' to their contact info and if either party decides to break the connection, the contact info should disappear from both address books.
I'm firmly in the former camp since I don't like the idea of my address book becoming a volatile place (esp. since I have over 2k+ people in there). However, I can see the argument for having more control over who has my contact info.
I'm curious to know what approach you (and Everyme) has taken and what you think of the points above. Am I off the mark?
I'm leaning very much towards everyone owning their own data. If someone doesn't want you to have their phone number, but you already know it, I don't think it's fair that the number should be deleted.
As Everyme syncs everywhere, deleting any type of info would be very, very bad.
One comment on your home page. When clicked on the link to learn about this new address book concept, the page loaded and I saw: "The address book is broken, and we are going to fix it." I almost hit the back button, thinking that the site was down.
Glad you're tackling this. I stopped adding contacts to my iPhone because keeping them up to date became too much work. Now I just search Gmail when I need a phone number or address. That's a hassle too, but at least I know the info is up to date.
You can sync your iPhone contacts with Gmail and save new contacts you add on your phone directly to Gmail if you add the account as an Exchange account on the phone.
iCloud is basically just for syncing your contacts that you manually created. We actually use iCloud to make syncing everywhere possible.
For example, if a person changes their phone number, that gets pushed to Everyme, which then is pushed to iCloud. As such, all of your devices now have the up-to-date info.
Thanks for bringing this up. Felt exactly the same pain, worked on it and launched a solution. No private beta or invitations required - 100% public and free !
The result: A dead simple "remote control" which allows your contacts to update their information directly in your phone book.
All you need to do is:
- setup trusted connections with friends by email address (invitations possible as well)
- enable sync via Google Sync (OAuth)
What you get: automatic and immediate contact updates straight into your phone when your contacts change their info.
I'm really glad to see a site, in YC, trying to tackle the problem of contacts. A particular problem I always see is that when people lose their phone, or lose all their numbers, they create groups or events on Facebook and spam their whole friend's list for numbers. Also, if people on my contact list change their number then all of a sudden I no longer have it. (emails, twitter accounts, etc too)
I'm happy for Everyme, but this really serves as more of a reminder to myself to follow my gut instinct. I had been working on my own version of a service that aimed to solve these exact problems that I felt like I had, myself. I had worked on it for about a month and had it working with full-text search on various info fields for each contact. I kind of wanted it to be a Quora (the find/ask a person feature) meets a cloud sync'd contacts service. Time to apply for YC S11 rolled around and I had planned on applying with this site, but at the last minute I switched to a location-based chat website, Geohello, which I posted on here. I spent a brief week or two on Geohello before switching to yet another site, which was a dumb location-based Groupon clone, for your iPhone, called Ayowe. I ended up applying to YC with both Geohello and Ayowe, instead of my contact info website, called Tactifo. Neither of the two sites I applied with got in. (I applied with two because I had a co-founder)
Just goes to show that I should have stuck with my gut and focused on the original site. Anyways, best of luck to Everyme! :)
It's great that Everyme is trying to address a very common contacts problem. I always use Google services to keep contacts up-to-date but when people change their contact details, I tend to confuse the old details with the new once after some time. And it's great Everyme is addressing this very same issue.
There are other problems related to contact management which some people usually get into too. I don't know if Everyme supports these, but here I go just in case.
1. Not every mobile network allows calling when you are using the international extension for a local number. For example I have a mobile number which I use in Singapore which doesn't allow me to use have the singapore's international calling code in the number to call from singapore to singapore. So having the international code added to the phone number doesn't make sense all the time. When switching to such a network, we have to change all the numbers to comply with these conditions.
2. Some mobile networks allows bypassing regular IDD and instead call through a VOIP service of their own. This is different from network operator to operator and operators require you to have a number prefix specific to the network if you want to make an international call through that service. But when you have more than 200-300 contacts in your phone, out of which at least 50 are contacts you regularly use, this becomes a headache to change these prefixes when you transfer from one network to other. I personally experience this trouble a lot as I am traveling between 4 countries regularly.
If Everyme can address these solutions, I'm sure this services will be a great win for lot of travelers.
Hi. Please check out atomiccontacts.com. I've also tackled this problem and FWIW applied to YC S2011. My name's Neil Rahilly and I'd love to hear feedback from HN readers. Comment here or email directly me at neilrahilly@gmail.com. Thanks!
Oh boy, this is sorely needed on the iPhone. My address book is in pretty crappy condition and I've been setting up all of these facebook sync options that haven't panned out very well. Hopefully is aggregates contact information nicely.
I, too, also immediately thought, 'So . . . Plaxo for your phone?' I notice that they have avoided any mention of Plaxo, so hopefully their service will not be a spammy waste.
We've definitely learnt from Plaxo's mistakes. Our invite system is incredibly polite, for example if 10 people invite you, you'll only ever get one email.
Cool idea. Time to guess on how the app will work:
-> Download the app.
-> Log in to one or more social networks, or create a contact-profile. Allow anyone who is your friend on a social network or already has your contact to stay up-to-date on changes to your contact information.
-> Check to see if existing contacts also have the app, and if so, then the two can now stay in sync forever! =)
-> Added bonus feature - all phone numbers will be stored with correct international extensions for easy international dialing.
How will it "magically" update a contacts information if that contact is not also a user of the service? Also, will you be able to change a contact's name or will it only be what their "profile" is? (ie. changing "John Smith" to "John Smith YC09") Otherwise sounds amazing.
Is there an android client? Why is this better than any other contact list?
I know there was a post about how products don't need a homepage, just give an email form, but realistically I'm not likely to ever give my email out if I have that little information about a product.
Not sure about the other features (could not find it actually) but if only it lets me set a list of contacts for which it reminds me the birthdays and also tells me that I haven't talked to them in a long time. Sigh.
Is this a big enough problem for average people? I know people create a "lost phone, need your number" Facebook group or event but is that enough of a pain? I've never seen more than one from the same person. So what exactly are you offering the average person with a messy, incomplete, and unsynced address book and why would they pay?
How is this different from HTC sync? Right now I have my Facebook contacts linked to contacts in my phone, and it pulls in information from their Facebook accounts?
Without ever getting into specifics, I use Google Voice integration (on my Sprint phone), and of course Gmail and Facebook, and HTC Sync linked them all and manages numbers/etc fantastically with just a few manual merges when I first got the phone.
I worked on Plaxo (or as the kids call it today... 'some electronic rolodex company' :-) )
This idea sounds exactly like Plaxo.
That being said, I'll sign up and see what they are up to. I believe there is a lot of innovation that can still happen here. Just recently, a few companies trying to attack this space again.
Also, what I would really like to know is if they have something here or if this is just another YC email signup test.
How is this gonna make you a million dollars? You're applying to YC, this ain't a hobby project, so that's why this is a legit question.
For the record, it doesn't really solve a pain for me. Just a minor annoyance, and it's not something I'm willing to spend money on. If you're making this to an app, remember that app sales are just 1 time profits. And the profit gradually goes down as your app lifetime goes up. Is earning $300K once (this is optimistic) really a serious business model?
If the OP is saying they're YCS11 then they're already in YC (that cohort is going through now). Your point about how they'll make money is still valid although it might be something they'll need to work out later (after they've 'made something people want').
The fact that smart phones do not intelligently dial numbers based on where you are in the world is absurd (eg: prepend dialing code!!)
The fact I have numerous contacts of the same people, each with different details (eg: two direct contacts named Oliver Cameron, one with an email, one with a mobile phone number) and then the iPhone never telling you which is which when you need to sms/email.
I would also love smart contact groups, like extract all the contacts with only email addresses, so that every time I wish to dial or sms a contact, I can only select actually useful ones. And so on.