Gmail add-on to turn signatures into email contacts with phone numbers, etc | Hacker News Reader

Gmail add-on to turn signatures into email contacts with phone numbers, etc

writethat.name

21 pointsjeffwidman11 comments

I'm almost definitely not the target demographic for this product, presumably meant for businesspeople who need to keep their extensive digital Rolodex up-to-date, but I doubt I would use it even if I were.

It's $20 a year to solve a problem that doesn't feel large enough to bother with to me. Does contact information really tend to change that often? When it changes, is it typically completely unannounced? $20/year really a large amount of money, but I don't feel like the price is justified for what this product does.

Also, I feel really nervous about handing over the keys to my email account to an unknown company - no offense to the developers intended. They say that no person will access the data, and that it is deleted as soon as it's processed, but as Jeff Atwood says, "your email account is a de-facto master password for your online identity."[1] Google is a well-known and fairly well-trusted company, so I don't really have a problem with them having such access (especially when they have so much to lose, and where they have so many people trusting them already), but I don't really feel safe giving some unknown party free reign over my email like that.

Also, would this only allow them access to my email, or to my entire Google profile? Honest question, since I don't know how Google sets such things up.

I definitely don't bear these folks any ill will - as I said, I'm not the target here by any stretch of the imagination, and I'm sure it's a fine product for what it's meant to do - but I don't see a huge market for this.

[1] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/06/please-give-us-your...

Seems like a great idea but not something I'd pay for.

I wouldn't pay for it either, since I only have to maintain contact with a manageable number of people.

But were I the head of a large company, or in any position wherein I was keeping track with an unmanageable number of people, I'd definitely be willing to pay $20 a year to ensure that when I urgently need to get in touch with someone, I'm not burned by having outdated contact information.

I'm actually a little bit surprised that my desktop mail client doesn't do anything like this already.

If you were the head of a large company, wouldn't you probably have an EA to do this manually as a part of their job?

Thank you for mentioning WriteThat.Name.

I'm sorry if we've hurt anyone sensibility by this joke about Calvin & Hobbes. We'll take it out in our next Design iteration.

Regarding market size, we feel that keeping your address book up-to-date is a real issue for most business people. Some of them might still have PA, but most of us don't, and less than $2/month strikes me as fair enough. This is a market space where we are competing with the likes of Plaxo or Xobni.

Adventurous six-year-old boy

Seriously?

What's the problem with that? Calvin was six years old. Or are you simply unfamiliar with the comic being referenced? [1][2]

[1] http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/

[2] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Calvin_and_Ho...

Yes, I was in fact unfamiliar, thank you for the pointer! Even so, it still strikes me as odd that one would use something that can be misinterpreted by a naive reader like me in their promotional material. Better err on the side of unfamiliarity, no?

Edit: Don't really care about karma, but since downvotes abound, please take a minute to explain your reasoning. You are punishing the post because: a) You think i'm a pervert just for thinking about that or b) I should have known about the comic reference?

If stuffed tigers and dream town didn't clue you in, there's also that it took you longer to quote and ask "Seriously?" (which added nothing to the discussion here, and you didn't bother to elaborate) than it would have taken to Google the name to see if it was a reference you hadn't gotten.

I figure either or both of these explain the down votes.

I don't really think you should have been downvoted, but for those that did, I suspect that your original post was downvoted for the perceived tone of "Really? You used that? Why would anyone want to do that?" Not everyone would make the connection that you didn't understand the reference, since Calvin and Hobbes is a wildly popular comic, at least in North America. I don't mean to assume you're not North American if you are, but it would explain why you were unfamiliar with the subject matter.

As for your second comment - the one I'm replying to now - I still don't think you deserve the downvotes, but some people might perceive it as an attack of sorts, e.g. "How dare they downvote me for such a simple misunderstanding!"

This comment (mine, I mean) doesn't really belong on Hacker News as it's a bit meta/behind-the-scenes/inside-baseball, so I suggest we just leave well enough alone, but I wanted to let you know that I understand your perspective and I'm sorry you were downvoted for a misunderstanding like this.

Much obliged for your reply. I'm not American, so this complicates things at times.

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