Ask YC: Here's our web app - What do you think? | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: Here's our web app - What do you think?

muchcloser.com

19 pointschaostheory60 comments

This seems like one step backwards from social networks. It's difficult maintaining information about your contacts, which is one of the strongest points of sites like facebook. You might look into developing some of these applications for the various social networking platforms (the contact-reminder seems pretty neat).

you're right - right now it doesn't scale for all of your contacts; but it is useful for immediate family like your cousin or sister or a few good friends. There are other kinks to work out as well - some known and some you guys will probably point out

Yeah that's what we're focused on doing right now - moving part of it to facebook/open social

You know what's funny? I got the idea for this because I started to hate how useless friendster and myspace were for real friends and I hated fake pokemon friends (gotta collect them all for your profile)

"You already have tons of friends and family, and maybe even that special someone too... Now what?"

When I saw this my reaction was... "I don't know, go on with my life as usual? Why is this being pointed out to me?"

Then I see "here's something that can help". Help with the fact that I have friends and family and maybe that special someone? What is this, a place for contracting hits?

Also, the signup button doesn't look like it fits with the rest of the site visually.

It's an interesting idea, good luck with it.

I guess there's a loss of context then. To me the main reason ppl join friendster and myspace is to meet new friends (who typically are only online) hence - "You already have tons of friends..." so what's the point in myspace? - here's something u can use

I guess we need to tweek it

well thanks for the feedback - if anyone has suggestions on this one please let us know

"Introducing Muchcloser: a FREE service that helps keep you from forgetting about the people who are important in your life."

If they are important, you won't forget them in the first place.

not true.

from personal experience when you're working on a big project 12-16 hours per day (6-7 days/week) - you'll be surprised at what you forget...

besides, what if you have a really big social circle?

I can see your point, but that phrase evokes the same reaction in me, and, I suspect, others.

You might want to rework it to indicate how this site helps you remember all the 'little things' that make you seem like you really care... I guess that sounds bad too, but do you see what I'm getting at? "Fred hates sushi, and Barney loves to go bowling, and remember not to ask Wilma about her divorce..."

good point - we'll see if we can tweak it...

so far the latest change is the best I can do for now... we'll probably figure out something else better sometime later

For someone that tried making something similar before, I immediately knew what chaos was trying to build (I think), despite the responses about "I'm not sure what I'd do with it".

I'm notorious at not being thoughtful, mostly because I can't remember what the hell other people are doing, and even when I do, I can't act on it in a timely way. I once called up a friend around May and congratulated her for graduating. She said, thanks, but proceeded to inform me that she graduated last year. And that I had called last year to congratulate her too.

I was far too ambitious when trying to build it. I wanted it to import my inbox and tell me things about friends without me having to explicitly write it down. In addition, it'd be able to let me know who I was neglecting and compare it to who was doing the same to be based on their frequency of reply and timeliness of reply. When doing PIM (personal info management) stuff, it's always far too easy to want to do too many things. So hopefully, you guys don't go down that path and keep things tight.

Anyway, this thing isn't for everyone, and it depends on what your social network looks like and what your attitude towards relationships to people are.

If your social network is comparatively small (within dunbar's number), then it's easy to keep track of people you care about. Our brains can personally keep track of the purported 150 people or so.

If your social network consists of mostly people that know each other, then you also wouldn't need it, since you'd get what's going on with your friends through hearsay and gossip. And you can act on that information if need be (however inaccurate it might be).

However, if you know a large number of people who don't know each other, ie. lots of little groups of friends that don't know each other, then you'd have a use for something like this. In addition, if the nature of your job/life requires you to have lots of little loose confederations, this is the sort of thing you might use.

whacked is right that people MAKE time for what/who's important in their lives. However, I think the value of a CRM for your personal life is not for the people who's really important you that you'd remember with your brain, or for the people you meet once and don't really care about. It's for the people that you like, but they are not in your daily lives that you wish to keep in better touch with. In a way, it's trying to be a tool to expand the upper limit of the dunbar number for users.

Anyway, I found it a tough sell, as most people only have 2 minutes to spare at parties, and not half an hour. I also did everything wrong from not releasing early to not simplifying and focusing the system. I eventually moved on to work on another thing. So good luck to ya'll and keep us updated on your progress. Chaos, feel free to email me if you want to bounce stuff off of someone.

will do on the email - definite ly could use your insight

agree with Wil. in fact, Wil, shoot me a quick msg if u could.. slvrspoon a t g-mail..

I like the idea, and I find the problem that you address to be a very good one. The wording on the website is a little on the mushy side, as if it were a dating site.

The biggest problem here is that you really need to get into people's inboxes somehow (like xobni). This is why I am not signing up - I know that the cost/benefit is too high for me - I am not capable of regularly returning to a destination site unless it involved something absolutely essential, like paying bills, or a fun time waster, like ycnews.

But I want to use your product. My email is all gmail. The information is all there: who I've corresponded with recently.

Perhaps you could latch onto the social networks, and monitor the inbox and wall features. Most of my neglected friends are connected to me on facebook...

yeah... this is one of many mountains we have to climb... the problem with gmail and any web mail is that it's closed (I think the reasoning is security). Right now the only way I know how to access them is through scraping...

Since we have social website apis - we figured it'd probably be a good initial focus outside of the stand alone site; given we're not as big as say Plaxo

Yeah given the good feedback it sounds like we have to work on the wording... it's been a thin line balancing it out - but yeah the mushy part is a good point. not sure how to do it and still include that this is for your family and your significant other too and not just friends

For gmail, don't scrape. Use a browser extension, ask for person's gmail credentials and process the emails server-side. Just ask users to enable their POP.

Showcase the info in the extension as a sidebar, etc., with updates say every 10 minutes.

I think the "reflection" of the photos on top is too stark. This needs to be toned down and very subtle. Also your intro paragraph to the right of the pic is too verbose. I'd cut this down and get straight to the point of what Muchcloser actually does.

both good calls

I'm not really a ui guy so I'll see what I can to fix the reflection

We'll try to fix the paragraph too... brevity and simplicity are tricky

This is pretty cool, it's kind of like a CRM for your friends.

"CRM for your friends" - that's a better tagline. It's a consumer version of Highrise.

considering many don't know what 'CRM' stands for, may not want to use that particular acronym

Decent enough. I was just wanting a new way to handle TODOs today and might give this a try.

Do you dogfood the TODO list for your development tasks?

What are your thoughts on rememberthemilk.com? Any features from there you'd add to your TODO management? (e.g. keyboard shortcuts, SMS reminders, etc).

Really seems like this app would make a better Facebook or OpenSocial app.

"Do you dogfood the TODO list for your development tasks?"

No we just strictly use this for personal stuff. We wanted to keep the focus tight (since we have limited resources), though if it's not what people want - things can change. Come to think of it I can't see why you can't use it for software development... well there is one thing. The social side of Muchcloser isn't released yet. Right now you can't collaborate with people - yet

"this app would make a better Facebook or OpenSocial app."

we're working on it =) (and fixing bugs too hehe)

Remember the milk is really one of the best to do lists out there and it's very pervasive (mobile, gcal, ...). Our main problem with it was that we wanted to decide what to do lists we wanted... at the end of the day though our main focus isn't really the to do list - it's people

I'll start by saying, I like it. It's like an advanced Rolodex. From a new users point of view: I know you have screen shots but I would recommend instead - a (Take a Tour) button. From my design point of view: I would design a more attractive logo and consider developing a cohesive color scheme and maybe tweak the overall design flow. Just my two cents...

yeah the ui has shortcomings here and there - but hopefully hopefully it's good enough in the very short term; our focus right now it bringing out new functionality (and fixing bugs - which I think a YC'r just stumbled upon)

the concept of keeping what your friends like and dislike is really cool. the contact-related stuff is really useful. but the todo list is probably not needed.

You maybe right... we'll see what happens as time goes.

I initially made that to learn/hack

Our focus now is more on the contacts

To be honest, I do like the aspect of the TODO list which is making a todo for a contact. Thinking back to the holidays, this would have been handy.

yeah it's a hint of what's to come - right now we're just laying out the foundation for what we really want to do

What is the problem you are trying to solve? What are your potential customers forced to do now?

The front page is all over the map: it mixes close friends, family, "a special one" with budgets and emails from "the team". What is it you're selling to a first-time visitor?

I am trying to give you healthy, productive criticism. Good luck with your project.

we are trying to help workaholics like crazy engineers and lawyers remember that they have family, wives, and friends - hence all the work references

its the same crowd that needs to live by '7 habits' and 'never eat alone'...

u pose good questions - as did evveryone else; we have a lot of front page work to do...

Would be interesting to know if you had any problems with ruby on rails? Is it stable enough? Have you deployed it as a kind of cluster?

imho give or take a little, it's as stable as the next language/framework. I've used java and python (and some of their frameworks), but then again I've never really done the core sys admin for any of the stuff I've built. It's not perfect, but it works. I think as long as you have a good host - you're golden, if not you're screwed.

no, it's not running on a cluster yet - we're not running into performance probs yet (though it would be a nice one to have if our numbers go high enough)

Am I alone in being wary of sites that show lots of faces?

To me it really sounds like: "Hey, you can trust us! Look, we've got plenty of happy people on our page!"

I noticed that trend especially with hosting providers...

In this case, the site is all about doing a better job dealing with people.

In general, putting faces on a website is just a way of taking advantage of the fact that people are drawn to and like faces. It's a more subtle version of using female models to sell cars, or watches, or shoes, etc.

Besides, who wants to be the "faceless" hosting provider?

I think you can infuse a great deal of personality in your site, without necessarily showing faces.

Lots of "faceless" corporations have "faceful" sites, so I don't take the presence of absence of faces on a site as a hint about quality either way.

unfortunately we don't have a ui/designer guru on our team =(

right now given our tight resources, our priority is building more features into muchcloser...

I'm not trying to diminish the effort spent on building this...but if someone has problems managing their personal relationships, I don't think spending MORE time on a computer will help them.

why not?

They should be out talking with these people, or meeting new people, face-to-face. If people need this app to manage relationships, they should be asking themselves why they can't manage relationships instead of asking how to manage them better. Don't get me wrong, I think what you did is great...just my two cents!

if that were the case, there wouldn't be any problems. there wouldnt be the need for books like 7 habits or Never Eat Alone and life would be perfect... just my opinion

I'd like to try the site without having to sign up. Let me get started and if I want to save my work and register then I can do that later.

very good idea - we have to think about the tech tradeoffs though for a while... it's a bit tricky given our current setup and our short term milestones

right now my thinking is if the front page(s) doesn't convince you - then we have to improve the page

I swear I've seen that first picture before (top left with the guy in a green shirt). Might want to get exclusive rights on something.

both are royalty free stock photos

Hence my point.

I think to release - we're aiming for good enough

Good Idea, I think you will make it. Useful tool mostly for people on sales, and by that I mean everybody.

People in sales, you mean? I would not call that everybody.

To contribute, I'm not sure this website does anything that I would want. It seems like sort of an address book + note-taking utility. Even if I had an online address book (I don't; Facebook keeps track of anyone I care about), I doubt I would want or need to take notes in it. As someone else wrote, why do I need to remember what people like? Facebook has a laundry list of my friends' interests. Further, anyone amongst my Facebook friends is someone I actually know in real life, and therefore am unlikely to forget about.

Maybe as a Facebook app? But even then, I'm not sure I see the value-add. Maybe I am just not within the target demographic...

I guess the front page still isn't strong enough to convince everyone...

you have good points - and we're working on it. right now what we have is a very basic version of what we'll be eventually pushing - which meets our needs but may not meet everyone elses. we just had to make a choice of either being cool vaporware or something that just came out

"why do I need to remember what people like? - anyone amongst my Facebook friends is someone I actually know in real life"

out of curiousity and research - how many people do you like? how many friends do you have on facebook?

Facebook friends weigh in at around 65.

There are really only about 30 I give a damn about, though. The rest get a very restrictive, business-purposes only profile. I am extremely hesitant to release too much information online, and only grant friendship privileges to people I know and trust in real life.

Granted, I do know people who have hundreds upon hundreds of friends. But the question is, do you really care about all those people, enough to catalog by hand what they like and dislike?

Haha, maybe I'm just antisocial. Good luck regardless; I admire anyone with the drive to release a pet project. Even if your project fails, you tried. And I'm sure it was fun to make...

I hate to ask for more stuff but this would help us out

if you don't mind - how often do you actually talk to/see the 30 on your list (beyond 2 liner ims and throwing virtual sheep)? what percentage is very often, sometimes, not often?

Hmmm. I'd say about half of those 30 I see on a regular basis. The rest I either converse with in emails or IRC or whatever.

The core 30: Very often = 50 % Sometimes = 50 %

The other 30 or so (business associates): Not often = 100%

Hope this helps. And if it is any further help when you move to the facebook platform, I try not to install facebook apps I can't see the source of. I know of several other people with this mentality; you may wish to publish source eventually to broaden your audience. Just a thought.

Again, hope this helps! :)

thanks - it really helps =D

by source - you mean code or author?

I would hesitate to share this information. It is easily abused.

which info?

Who my intimates are, what kind of gifts they prefer, when the last time I talked to them was.

we have a privacy policy and we are transparent with what we do.

How do you make money?

advertising

Really? Enough to be worthwhile?

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