Everyme (YC S11) Launches Mobile App That Aims To Get Social Circles Right | Hacker News Reader

Everyme (YC S11) Launches Mobile App That Aims To Get Social Circles Right

techcrunch.com

87 pointsolivercameron38 comments

I've been beta testing Everyme for a few months, and I am a huge fan of the founders too (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3539676)

Everyme makes perfect sense - I regularly encounter "status updates" (be they links, updates, or photos) that I want to share to a subset of my friends or family. Everyone does.

The Techcrunch article totally under sells the huge thing that Everyme does that no one else does:

> Everyme uses your phone’s address book for sharing, and if people don’t have Everyme accounts, they can still see and post content through email and text messages

How cool is this? Suddenly, I can create a family circle - and even my family - who are barely on Facebook - can enjoy and engage with relevant content. I think this is huge, and it is also going to drive huge adoption for Everyme. My Grandmother isn't on Facebook, hell, she isn't on Email, but she is on SMS. Everyme just works.

For the first time ever in a social network, when you post a relevant status update, everyone that you want to see it, will see it.

I am hoping they add a Maps / Location feature, and then they've also solved the Beluga gap in this market. I really think these guys are on to something.

Hmm.. it wouldn't be useful to me since I don't an address book in my phone?

> Everyme uses your phone’s address book for sharing, and if people don’t have Everyme accounts, they can still see and post content through email and text messages

This is actually a really cool way of solving your initial social network chicken and egg problem as well. When someone is regularly getting content from your app by text or email, they are eventually going to think of signing up for the service to make managing all that content easier.

This is a real disappointment for me. While in development, Everyme was presented as a smart address book that would centralize the contacts from all your social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn...), as explained in this article: http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/18/andreessen-horowitz-crunchf....

It sounded like a great idea to me to centralize all these contacts in one single place and to be able to sync them with your iPhone's address book.

But it seems that they moved away from this idea to become a Path / Google+ hybrid.

You should take a look at our service: http://connex.io

Our value proposition is quite close to Everyme's original one.

Let me know what you think!

"Everyme uses your phone’s address book for sharing, and if people don’t have Everyme accounts, they can still see and post content through email and text messages."

This is a brilliant way to overcome the chicken-and-egg problem, which is probably the biggest problem a new social network is facing.

I don't want to share my kids' pictures with everyone on Facebook. And no, my mom is not going to join Google+ (nor should she), so having her receive the posts by emails for now is just brilliant.

I think the Everyme guys may be on to something.

Facebook supports granular privacy for all posts via friend lists, and will even suggest friends to add to lists.

Want to share pics with just your family? Don't want to turn down a friend request from a coworker, but don't want them to see anything (Restricted list)? Facebook has these features. These social networks are going nowhere.

The lists on Facebook aren't shared. They're just my lists, nobody else can see who they're shared with. Socially this makes them utterly useless, it doesn't form communities. (Facebook groups does this, but it isn't central to the experience, like it is apparently in everyme)

Facebook also requires that everyone you share with has a Facebook account. When I have a party, I have to go and email everyone by hand who isn't on Facebook. You can put their emails into Facebook, but I assume that will make the recipient sign up, so I don't do it.

Both these improvements in Everyme make a lot of sense to me. If only it a) had DuckDuckGo like privacy, b) was truly distributed, c) wasn't for one proprietary OS only.

Ah well.

IMHO "granular" is the problem, not the solution. Unless of course granular can also be easy/native to the core usage pattern. Not sure why FB hasn't cracked this nut yet, but seems like EveryMe is working on getting granular right, which makes it worthy of attention.

To be fair, you can add email-only people to G+ as well.

in the previous century, we used to put several email addresses separated by , or ; and it worked quite well to share pics with the family :)

That would work, but if you want to share with the same people again, you have to retype their addresses, at least with a copy and paste. With a good mobile platform it streamlines the process and can make sharing a much more spontaneous action, and with the concept of a personalized "circle", you also get a more intimate feel than an email thread :)

Distribution lists are a solved problem also, even though Google refuses to support them in mobile Gmail.

>The app doesn’t allow users to share anything from Everyme to Facebook, Twitter, or other social networks — Cameron says that’s so you know that what’s shared in a Circle stays in the Circle.

These guys have it right. It's about time a social network started focusing on the quality of communication rather than the quantity of connections.

Agree with the focus on quality of communication, but is the issue here self-inflicted? Is Everyme trying to solve a problem created because too many of us "friended" their co-workers?

Does it matter if it's self-inflicted? People want, need, and pay for solutions to self-inflicted problems all of the time.

Besides, am I really supposed to ignore friend requests from co-workers? It's a socially dangerous thing to do!

This makes a lot of sense to me. Back in college, Facebook was a place for communication with friends. Wall posts back and forth had an intimate feel, and no one worried about privacy when it was a closed network.

Somewhere along the way to to a professional career however, I cleaned up my profile, switched most of my updates to public, and shifted towards news sharing and commentary. Twitter and Google+ serve the same purpose for me, and Path feels restrictive since I don't really want to mix family, high school friends, college friends, work friends. This looks like it definitely has the potential to fill that void for private group communication.

Facebook should open a new savings account and deposit $1.37 million every day. In two years it will have the $1 billion they'll pay to acquire Everyme.

Consolidation-athon?

Eeesh, was not aware that merely creating a circle would spam all of my friends in that circle. I like the idea behind everyme, but if it isn't properly communicated when I'll be sending stuff to friends you lose a lot of trust really fast.

Edit: Not entirely true, requires a post first, see ensuing thread...

Hi newhouse. Thanks for trying Everyme. We've thought a lot about this process and have made sure not to do anything without your permission. We don't spam your friends when you create a Circle. We only share things with your Circle friends when you actually post them, by clicking the share button in the Circle.

You're right, my error. I had a friend mention that she received two separate text messages, the first being about the post, the second being the context (i.e. they were added to a circle). I mistakenly assumed that they weren't sent together and sent in the opposite order. Might be nice to somehow communicate more explicitly that no one is notified until after you post something in a circle.

Yes, I agree! That is something we are working on. We are in a difficult place because we are extraordinarily cautionary about what messages we send through email/text but we don't to clutter the UI with alerts and confirm dialogs.

Some problems:

I mistyped a phone number and I cant remove it.

There are people in my family circle which have the same last name but are not in my family and I cant edit the circle.

I cant delete a circle....

ARGH I think I just sent "Sam loves this" to a bunch of people! WTF.

I am deleting this until this crap is fixed.

Sam, slide to delete works on phone numbers, circles, stories, people in your circles, and other places in the app where you need to remove data. Hope that helps! vibhu@everyme.com if you need more assistance.

You can do this using Facebook's Lists. Can you not?

People seem to be using it. I'm seeing more and more posts from my friends shared with "custom" lists. I myself use that feature (esp. the built-in "Close Friends" list) often.

That doesn't mean this is a bad idea from the investment point of view.

I like that I can post content through email and text messages. That said, do we really need a single app that manages multiple 'circles'?

When I look at my phone, my apps are my 'circles'.

For close friends and family, I have text/email/Path. For my significant other, I have Pair. For college/social friends, I have Foursquare/Instagram. For mass distribution, I have Facebook/Twitter. Etc.

With more and more apps offering Twitter/Facebook login, I can quickly pick and choose who I want to share an app with and form a 'circle' around that app.

Never thought of the various social apps like that before .. there really need not be One Social Network To Rule Them All !

Some UI elements look exactly like in Path app, is this the same company?

I don’t understand why people don’t just use email for this. A few months I set up a mailing list for our family at fiesta.cc (easy private mailing lists) and we’ve all been using it a lot.

Do we really need another social network site? Yes, we do! I am still waiting for a winner that allows me to share private details such as kid photos and contact information with select family members close friends. I want this data to be unavailable to anyone outside of my circle, including advertisers. Are there options available now that do this? Yes again, but I need a solution that I can get Grandma on board just as easily as my technically inclined brothers.

most grandmas don't use smartphones...

How long are we going to be saying that grandmas are technologically illiterate?

RFC 3 is older (by a few months) than me - April 1969.

Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf are about 70. (That's old enough to be a great grand-parent.) Jon Postel was born in 1943. There are many old women who are Internet pioneers because they were librarians, and the Internet was something that got rolled out to university libraries early on.

The killer app for getting the elderly online and using computers/tablets/smartphones has been Skype, in my experience. Specifically, video chat. It's revolutionised communication with family who live far away. I suppose these days FaceTime would be equally appropriate. From there it's a slippery slope for most of them. The retired in my partner's and my family now spend more time playing video games than those of us in our 20s. (they simply have more time to spare)

I could see them picking up on something like this if they could overcome the trust barrier. Most 50+s I know don't trust Facebook and don't have an account there (I don't trust them either, but I'm in the minority in my age group).

My problem with all these social networks is getting the family on board.

I'm still waiting for a mature product that I can be confident about sharing with them - G+ is there, but not really anything else. I don't want to get +20 people onto a site only to have it go "sorry, we're shutting down", or "yay, we've been acquired, sorry early adopters" in a year.

I've been burnt before, and I hate it when it happens.

In my opinion, to be truly confident that your data will be forever exclusive to yourself and people you choose is to pay for the service, to keep it running in the long run.

Otherwise, how is the service going to survive? They have to monetize somehow down the road to pay the bills.

See if you agree with what the creator of Pinboard says: http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/

I personally run a site called Handpick that helps people curate links and inform in a considerate manner:

http://handpick.me

I have paying subscribers who help me keep the lights on and do not have pressure to monetize my users' data in any way.

The question is: do you care enough how your data is handled to pay for the service?

Ning?

Circles! Woo!

Not really.

I am completely underwhelmed by this. Not impressed. At all.

I fail to see what this adds to the social network landscape that's unique or can't be easily replicated by FB, G+, etc. Just seems bland. Like white bread.

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