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Comment by peterwwillis | Hacker News Reader

Do you actually contact 10,000 people in a way that's not spam? The answer is obviously No. Nobody talks to 10,000 people.

What are you gonna do, spend five weeks calling the first 4,000 people? Send 2,500 text messages? CC 8,000 users on your annual Christmas Greeting e-mail? How the hell would you even begin to sort through that many contacts using a cell phone or a standard e-mail client?

It's Google. This company serves the general public and doesn't have the resources to tailor its service to every asshole (or Executive) with unrealistic expectations. Next time somebody asks for more than 10,000 contacts they should just flip him the bird.

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Congressional respresentatives can easily have more than 10,000 'contacts.' It would be interesting to see if Microsoft's Exchange server can handle more than 10,000. Active Directory certainly can. So perhaps it would be a competitive feature.

For this community however I would agree there is always a tension between the 80 - 90% solution and the outliers. If you have more business than you can handle, supporting outliers seems like a waste of resources, the problem comes when someone decides to support those outliers and builds a system that can handle your customer base as well. That gives them the high ground competitively.

From Google's perspective I suspect its not like they get enough revenue from this whole Apps business to make it worth their while, it seems to be more of a way to poke MS than a product. (But disclaimer time I use Google's app)

I don't think anyone in Congress runs their email off a Gmail account.

Sarah used yahoo.

Exchange isn't much better. I've heard of people having contacts 'magically' disappear when they reach absurdly high numbers such as this guys.

In Exchange, you can have multiple folders that contain contacts. I asked our Exchange guys, who said that over about 5,000 you may run into issues. YMMV.

I haven't worked in a Congressional office, but if you're keeping track of constituent corespondents with Exchange contacts associated with individual users, your system is going to break down well before 10,000 users.

there's a distinction that should be made between sending spam and having many contacts. Limiting the amount recipients to a message will prevent spam. Having many contacts doesn't mean the person is a spammer.

A quick google says Google Apps started around feb 2006. Let's assume the user was an early adopter, and today is mar 2011. 10000 contacts / (365 * 5 years) ~= 5 to 6 new contacts a day. Seems possible; maybe in a weekend the user will have 20 new contacts and quiet the entire week... the # of contacts collected throughout the lifetime of an inbox doesn't say anything about the need to send message to all of the contacts.

This. The guy is obviously trying to run a spam newsletter on the cheap, using the trusted status of google's MTAs to ensure deliverable spam.

Nobody can or will maintain relationships with anywhere near 10k contacts. Dunbar indicated that humans are only capable of maintaining relationships with roughly 150 people at any given point in time. This guy is overstating his requirements by nearly two orders of magnitude.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

I don't know if you're familiar with Brad Feld (post author), but he's a big-deal VC at the Foundry Group in Boulder. Most definitely not a spammer.

You both are bananas.

Brad Feld is not just a VC, but is co-founder of TechStars. TechStars is kind of like YCombinator, except instead of just trying to find a handful of a super specific kind of company, they're growing a network far and wide of incubators across the entire U.S. They have programs in Boulder, New York, Boston, Seattle, and are growing even further through their "TechStars Network".

I met Brad briefly on their book tour. He's very much an "I'll look you in the eye and listen to who you are and what you're doing, and see how I can help" kind of guy. Unlike YCombinator, TechStars pledges to try and help out EVERY company who applies, with advice or connections or whatever they can do, even though they can only accept a few into their program. I'm sure he's connected former applicants to TechStars (not even accepted companies, applicants) with strategic partners he meets on the road. I'm sure he makes all kinds of crazy connections between contacts. In some sense, running an incubator and being a VC.... making connections like that is his JOB.

Brad doesn't have my contact info, but if I gave him my card and he ever contacted me, or gave my info to someone else, it would be the OPPOSITE of spam. I would be stoked to see anything in my inbox from him or someone in his network. Brad is really a "water that raises all boats" kind of person, from what I've seen.

That's very nice. I don't care who the user is, there's no way humanly possible any person can or will maintain individual contact with 10,000 people over the course of a year. Just trying to remember who half of the people were or when the last time you talked or what about would be ridiculous.

It seems to me this is why there are (for example) sales tools which help track relationships and organize aggregate contact data into a manageable system. But come on. However much of a VC rockstar Brad Feld is, he's not e-mailing or calling 10,000 people. Like most people he'll add everyone he meets to his standard contacts list, but this is not scalable, and there's probably a couple thousand people sitting in the list that either he's never had correspondence with or hasn't for a year or more, making a follow-up unlikely. Of course I am generalizing and assuming based on my own experience with PIM systems.

Instead of just adding people to a contact list and forgetting about it perhaps Brad should invest his time in a system which will provide more features tailored to the nature of his business contacts, and that way Google doesn't have to redesign its infrastructure to support 0.001% of users. That's all i'm saying.

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