Andreessen Horowitz, CrunchFund Back Social Address Book Everyme (YC S11)
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I can't speak on iOS (which is what they seem to be targeting at least initially. Based on the picture of the iPhone on the splash page, along with mention of Instagram) because I haven't used an iPhone daily since the 3GS.
I used to use an Android device, but now use a Windows Phone and a lot of this stuff is automatically integrated into the default contact application in Windows Phone. Information can be pulled from Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Gmail, Outlook, and Windows Live. It also shows my history interaction with a contact (MSN messages, phone calls, e-mails, facebook chat, text messages, etc).
I seem to recall that on certain android devices (i.e. those HTC sense and Moto Blur) similar options were available. I know vanilla Android had some decent integration with facebook with Froyo.
Heck, even my mom's blackberry running OS6 has quite a few of these features (social network integration, history, etc).
Am I missing something here ?
It was an awesome feature, but Google disabled it in Android 2.3.3 due to data portability concerns: http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/22/google-disables-contact-s...
That leaves plenty of room for a startup to come in.
* my Android has too many random GMail contacts
* my iPhone doesn't have enough contacts
* multiple users per device doesn't work at all
I may be somewhat of an edge case, but I think the contacts space has a lot of edge cases, and we'll see a lot of innovation in the next few years.
I do think address books are a bit broken these days, especially with how you get info in/out of them. Reconciling duplicates and adding social info is definitely useful. However, building yet-another social-network based on it is not enough to entice me to use it (I already have enough of those).
I guess, what I'd prefer is something like rapportive and writethat.name but as a stand-alone address book.
I switched to iCloud contact sync, because it has a richer data model (try to tell your 4S that a certain contact is your mom, and it would creation the relationship as "supervisor" or something).
Now this creates a problem, because I very frequently add/edit contact in Gmail and I want that to sync to my phone automatically over the air, and pretty quickly.
Is there something that will keep iCloud and Google contacts in sync, without losing the richer data from iCloud?
Congratulations, though, and best of luck – looking forward to enjoying better contacts.
Just don’t take a cue from your competitors and start selling my info / interests…