Is anyone else getting a dystopian vibe from the idea of "managing" friends and family?
I can definitely see this service being useful, but that branding makes me feel very uncomfortable.
I can definitely see this service being useful, but that branding makes me feel very uncomfortable.
It's all social management, even if informal. But it's so natural you might not have thought about it as "management."
Nothing wrong with formalizing it and taking it all digital, if anything it can foster closer relationships if it's easy to use and consolidated. Someone can only remember so much at once and its great they care enough to store that information for easy retrieval in the future. We have never, as a society, faulted people for writing things down, (Rolodex is a generic trademark, for crying out loud), we are all only human. We don't think twice about setting a reminder to take medication or water the plants.
These things are less about "managing" and more about cultivating relationships and memories. "Organizing" is a word with less controlling vibes. Maybe start there and take a journey through the thesaurus? http://www.thesaurus.com/browse/organizing?s=t
- stay in touch/keep in touch
- coordinate
- focus
- balance
- "look after", as in "look after you relationships"
"nurture" "Attend to" "Mind to" "Tend to" "Cultivate" "Nourish"
But this I instantly understood.
Cut out the actual browser window part, and paste that on to an image of an address book/planner with the same information about Jim Halpert. That way it's an instant visual association with an existing non-computer idea.
I would like this to be hosted for $12/year.
poetic terms that say nothing
?!
If poetic terms say nothing then why is poetry (both literary and lyrical, as in songs) so popular? Social relations are not purely functional or transactional, although they often have those aims or characteristics. Friendship and warm familial relations are based on feelings. I often say that hackers need to develop better emotional intelligence and this is a good example.
Would you take someone on a date and say 'statistics indicate that we have a high degree of socioeconomic compatibility and synergistic aesthetic appeal, suggesting that we should pursue a merger strategy so as to maximize our mutual future advantage?' Most people would prefer to hear something along the lines of 'I love you and want to marry you.'
I understand that your product is aimed at busy people who are invested in their work and want to handle their social relations at least as well as their business ones. But you need to be cognizant of their motivations for doing that; because they like, love and generally care about the people in their lives that lie outside their career. It is that drive which might move someone to start using your product, and you must appeal to that drive, which is an emotional one, in emotional terms.
Incidentally, calling it Monica carries connotations of having an assistant called Monica that helps you remember those little personal obligations and although I'm sure you didn't intend this it gives me a sort of sexist vibe because historically such tasks have often been delegated to stereotypically female subordinates by busy executives (think Pepper Potts in the Iron Man story franchise).
Even though both men and women seem to prefer female identities for things like GPS and virtual assistants, a gendered brand identity like this is likely to limit your appeal to one half of the population straight out of the gate. The brand values you wish to attach to your product are reliability, loyalty, and patience, so it would be worth your while to dig through mythology and fiction in search of characters who are associated with those qualities and then develop variations from any particularly inspiring name stems you encounter so as to leverage those psychic associations.
Regarding the gender, I don't know what to think about this. It's not by any mean a way to degrade women. I will definitely consider choosing another name because I understand how some people could be offended by that, which is not at all my intention, ever.
You seem to indicate that this devaluation is a sort of false accusation to which we should not make ourselves vulnerable.
Yet, that subordinate clause rings true to me as an independent statement.
Why should I let just any person (particularly family; none of mine know CS) occupy any nontrivial amount of space in my day-to-day consciousness; when such space could instead be used by something useful?
Anyway, nice work.
First thing I thought. Although, it is accurate in a sense given that there's a lot to track, filter, setup and so on. It's why the same activities are called "management" in CRM. It's just socially unacceptable to say the truth sometimes. In this case, the author should change the wording so it doesn't say CRM or "manage." Instead, some propaganda along lines of "family reminder app" so you "don't miss an opportunity" might sound nicer. Actually, the opening paragraph seems fine.
However, the need for recording and documentation is as old as scribbles on a cave wall and some also really do need to document things to remember.
I must agree, though, with the wording. It is unfortunate but it probably does attract those who have an itch for efficiency.
For example: if, unbeknownst to you, two of your friends were involved in some kind of criminal conspiracy and you had spoken/met with both of them near the time it was known that they had met, an enterprising prosecutor could use your record of having met with them to accuse you of having taken part.
- Make it easy for people to host data independently of you. Either by running your app on thier server (related to discussion above about for Heroku/Sandstorm, but a regular VPS is probably preferable), or using your client to read data stored in some generic format, e.g. an existing CardDav server, or even just Dropbox, with the web UI running locally, or as an extension.
The most important features for self hosting are probably maturity and stability, and signed releases via an up-to-date PPA.
For using some generic back-end you'd need to support it.
Send me an email and I'll be happy to go into more detail. (I'm on a plane which is hopefully taking off soon, so I don't have time to write more right now.)
Theoretically, running the software on a server in Sealand or something like that would put the physical hardware beyond the reach of a subpoena but then, they could lock you up for contempt if you don't give your password to it.
Anyone comment on data export functions?