[jabelk]

Wholeheartedly agree with the article. I have absolute control of my inbox with filters, labels, and signing up for newsletters and/or updates on various subjects. There is no way a centralized end-to-end service is going to eclipse email for me, unless they radically change their business models.

The value proposition is just really bad in all the services I've seen so far.

"Oh, you want me to sign up for your service so that I can look at the content you think I should see alongside the ads you're making money off of? And what exactly is in it for me?"

Something I would pay for: a rolodex social network. No centralized feed. No useless info. Your profile is 2-3 sentences and your current city (with some sort of maps integration for when you travel, to see who's near you). Two buttons, one to request to view resume, and another to request to view email. That's it. With the idea being, you use the site to enable you to keep up with people. You add people you know or have worked with to your network, and you can easily get their current email and catch up when you're in the same city. Simple, no obnoxious ads, no slimy tactics to increase time on the site.

Probably will never come to pass, but I can dream...

[timjahn]

"Something I would pay for: a rolodex social network. No centralized feed. No useless info. Your profile is 2-3 sentences and your current city (with some sort of maps integration for when you travel, to see who's near you). Two buttons, one to request to view resume, and another to request to view email. That's it. With the idea being, you use the site to enable you to keep up with people. You add people you know or have worked with to your network, and you can easily get their current email and catch up when you're in the same city. Simple, no obnoxious ads, no slimy tactics to increase time on the site."

I really want this too. I need some sort of simple contact rolodex that simply shows who I know, why I know them, and why they're important (where do they work, how do I know them, who are they connected to, etc.). Just a simple UI, something that I would use most of the time simply to search.

[mgbmtl]

Probably overkill for your needs, but I use CiviCRM (https://civicrm.org) to do that for my work. It's basically a centralized web-based contact list, for which you can then link them between each other (different types of relations), add custom fields, etc. -- the program does a lot more than that (online fundraising, mass mail, event management, and other tools mostly aimed for non-profits/volunteer groups), but you can also just use it for that.

It's then possible to expose the contact data to LDAP using "ldapcivi" (https://github.com/TechToThePeople/ldapcivi), so that the contact data can be queried from any mail client (including phones).

We also integrated CiviCRM with our IRC bot, so we can query emails and other info from there. Ex: "who is John Doe" on irc will respond with the basic data (name, email, phone), as well as the relationships of that contact, ex: "John is Manager of foo at ACME".

[lotharbot]

"why I know them" is a crucial feature missing from many services (along with "what name or alias I know them under").

I have hundreds of contacts from church, school, work, video games, etc.

[Pxtl]

Sounds like google's circles. The problem is that most folks treat their Gmail account as their "real" account and don't give it out willy-nilly. Also, that the circles thing is one-way - I can use circles to control how I see others, but can't use them to control how they see me.

[wdewind]

> Also, that the circles thing is one-way - I can use circles to control how I see others, but can't use them to control how they see me.

No, if you share something to a circle someone isn't in they wont see it, so they do let you control how others see you. Not a huge G+ fan, but I was a fan of circles.

[Pxtl]

I mean having a fully different profile and name, not just different posts.

[msh]

I was not that big fan of circles, made sharing with the wrong people easy.

I like that my personal life (facebook) and professional (linkedin) is two different networks. Its hard to accidentally share the the bad joke with my professional network.

[lotharbot]

I think something like circles could be done right -- if each circle had a custom background, etc. so that it looked and felt like a different website. I'm not worried about posting political rants to LinkedIn because it's obvious I'm on LinkedIn rather than FaceBook or Google+; I wouldn't be worried about posting to my coworkers group if there were very obvious signifiers that I was in that group.

[notatoad]

which is good. i don't want some guy i met at a work thing once adding himself to my best friends circle.

[obeattie]

IIRC, Facebook used to have this feature (ages ago), but it was removed. It used to ask where you knew someone from when sending a friend request, and it didn't let you send the request if you didn't know the person.

[lmm]

In the early days it allowed "I don't even know this person" as a reason.

[lsc]

yeah. Linkedin needs to implement this. Just a way to add notes that are only view-able to me would solve the problem.

[travem]

On the profile page of your contact there is a "★ Relationship" button. Click that and it will let you add general notes or more detailed information about how you met.

[lotharbot]

who is that information viewable by?

I don't want to put in "obnoxious guy from conference" and then have that person be able to read it.

[travem]

According to the LinkedIn help center [1]:

"Your note will be visible in the Relationship section of the profile and will only be visible to you."

Of course you may wish to store such information in a different system to avoid the possibility of LinkedIn inadvertently leaking the data.

[1] https://help.linkedin.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/43370/kw/W...

[lsc]

Yeah, something that stores the data in a system I control and then pastes it on to the page with a greasemonkey script would be optimal.

But, then that would be work.

[lsc]

huh, cool. that's what I was asking for.

[goblin89]

> I need some sort of simple contact rolodex that simply shows who I know, why I know them, and why they're important…

Would you be one of them? Would you actually keep and update yet another online profile, so that other people can find you on this particular network?

> something that I would use most of the time simply to search.

The answer to the above question from almost everyone you might want to search for seems almost certain to be “no”.

[pjbrunet]

Have you tried Rapportive? https://rapportive.com/ It shows additional information about the person in your Gmail sidebar.

Also you might want to check out Nimble, like Rapportive it pulls info from other social networks. If there's a feature you want, it seems they listen to ideas.

I've also used http://www.cerberusweb.com/tour for sorting email and importing additional data about people, but that might be overkill. With Cerberus you would have to import the location data info yourself, for example. It's a "power user" type of application, very versatile.

[tremendo]

Something like Contatta? I used to work there a year or so ago, so I may be biased, but still feel it's an improvement over email and sterile CRM. I personally like how it brings several pieces together, even if it's still missing a calendar for example. It's still in open beta, but I know it's extensible too. I may sound like an ad, but there's nothing for me to gain from it now, just my opinion.

[joelhaus]

I picture something as simple as "Gmail Directory".

Allowing you to share your contact info with people you choose and request access to others information.

[augustocallejas]

Humin sounds like what you're looking for: https://www.humin.com/#/product

[PeterWhittaker]

Humin looks interesting but logging in with facebook is a deal-breaker for me. Logging in with google would be slightly better, since all of my contacts are there already and if Humin doesn't integrate with my current contacts I'm not sure what value it has.

Contacts+ uses my google and facebook and twitter credentials to link to those services, not to verify who I am - and if I don't want to link to FB or twitter, I don't have to; I'm definitely uncomfortable with being forced to use a particular identity provider.

I wonder if Humin has really thought through their identity and credential management requirements. A great many sites these days allow one to create an account simply by logging in "on the fly" using an existing email address and a password you enter then and there. One email validation email and you're good to go.

Why would Humin need more than that?

[fred_durst]

"Why they're important". I feel like that is a pretty tough one to generalize.

[tomsthumb]

For people that you _might_ forget it should be pretty easy to summarize in a sentence or two. Two sentences should easily cover when, where, and why you met. Throw in common contacts and you're good to go. Obviously these same two sentences might not encapsulate why your wife is important to you, but, really, you aren't quite likely to forget that either.

[fred_durst]

I just meant it felt kind of creepy.

[viewer5]

Why do you say that? It seems like an important thing to keep track of, for people who you don't keep in regular contact with. Prevents "Who the heck is Greg Bobberton?", if you can just look and see "Greg Bobberton: that guy from the Widgetpalooza conference, was interested in that one idea I had" (obviously with less vague specifics).

Why do you feel it would be a creepy feature?

[bfung]

the UI is a bit off, but doesn't Google+ circles provide this functionality?

Or the "Notes" section in the Contacts app on iPhone?

Or LinkedIn even?

What is missing or wrong with the current social network/address book things?

[iminaii]

How much would you pay? I might build that.

[tomphoolery]

It's called "Contacts.app".

[marban]

Plaxo?

[verisimilidude]

I recently gave serious thought to building something similar to a rolodex social network, but eventually poked too many holes in it to follow through.

I'd just come back from a conference at which I'd been asked for business cards by lots of people, maybe a hundred. Of all those people, I only really cared to hear back from a few. Though it's nice to have my name out there and be cordial in the industry, I wanted to place some kind of filter on all the vendor spam that inevitably followed. If...I could easily provide "redacted" or "enriched" contact info, maybe via QR on a smartphone screen, for instance, it would be possible to meter who gets which contact info without hurting any future networking opportunities.

If any of you can figure out how to make this work, I'd definitely pay for it.

[jabelk]

This is totally off the cuff, but here's my first thought:

To sign up for the site, you need only a username, password, and verification method (email/sms/facebook/something to authenticate you as a person, but this wouldn't necessarily be tied to the account). The usernames are unique, and your personal url is domain.com/username or something along those lines (like reddit).

Then you can give your business card to everyone and their spammy recruiter, and if they follow up and visit your domain.com/username, they can hit the "request email" button, at which point you can choose which email to give them or ignore it all together. Potential problem is that unique usernames will mean that professional ones run out quickly. Not sure at what scale that becomes an issue....

In other news, if anyone here is going to be at hackMIT and would be interested in working on something like this, email me (its in my profile).

[jlees]

Hmm, a kind of double opt-in? (Or possibly triple if you count handing out the card in the first place.)

Interesting idea, at the same time there are ways to replicate this today in terms of 'send me a blind message on Facebook/LinkedIn and I'll maybe reply' and it doesn't seem to work well, at least not in my experience. It's about the power dynamic, fundamentally.

[notahacker]

Doesn't the facility to redirect email from certain addresses straight to a spam box or to higher priority accounts make regular email filters more-or-less functionally equivalent?

I don't think I give my business card out to enough spammers for the need to manually opt-in everyone that wants to email me to be a less laborious task than blocking/ignoring the occasional promotional mailing.

[soneca]

I couldn't reply on your last comment, so it will be here. How would be your "9 or 10 cards"?

I imagine you can just control what info a conctact would have access. Maybe: professional email, personal email, office phone, personal phone, where do you work. Maybe one profile for each info..but that is 5... how to reach 9 or 10?

I think of a relationship regulated by tags. Tags similar to Google+ Circles. You can use to set context: <church>, <college>, <company>. Or access: <prospect>, <top investor>, <important network>, <conference contact>. You can define an access profile for a particular tag.

You can change contacts though an app, but he won't have any access until you alocate a tag to him. So you won't offend anyone upfront, as even the VIP investors will have to wait until you put an all-accesstag on them. So it is a much more subtle acknowledge when after weeks the contact still don't have access to your email.

[verisimilidude]

I could imagine setting up the following cards right away. And by "card", I'm not specifically referring to a piece of paper, but perhaps some kind of contact-info-related digital object.

* BFFs

* Recent acquaintances

* Close family (reasonable people)

* Extended family (think annoying newsletter emails)

* Co-workers (cell number included)

* Clients (cell number definitely not included)

* Spammy business contacts (vendors)

* Travel (something I could hand out with temp hotel and phone info, etc.)

* Japanese (my wife is from Japan, we have lots of friends here and visit there often)

I could also imagine handing out specific cards at various social functions. For example, at a writing club I used to attend, I'd want to provide a link to my portfolio online. I'd never ever want anyone else to read that embarrassing stuff though. In another case, I used to attend a board game club, and it would've been nice to hand out cards with links to my profile on boardgamegeek, meet-up profile, etc.

It seems like this would work best if the exchange format was simply vCard or some other open format. You get to control who gets what at the point of exchange, and they can consume it into whatever system they like. There's no after-the-fact futzing with tags or permissions or contact management; it's just a system to control how you present yourself. The whole idea is probably DOA if you can't interface with the rest of the world's contact software. Maybe you allow connections if both people in the exchange are users of your service, but you wouldn't want to take it for granted.

As an aside, this got really interesting when we considered the "hot girl in a bar" situation. Let's say she gets asked for contact details many times, it's too loud to hear names or whatever, so she might need to snap a picture of the guy at any point of exchange, then review and modify permissions later. But that seems kinda fussy as a system.

[walterbell]

See Boston Review (Mar 2014) editorial on pseudonyms, with responses by Frank Pasquale, Bruce Schneier, Richard Stallman, Evgeny Morozov & others, http://bostonreview.net/forum/reed-hundt-saving-privacy

[DanBC]

> If any of you can figure out how to make this work, I'd definitely pay for it.

You have two versions of your business card. One goes to anyone and has a junk email. The other goes to wanted contacts, and has an email that you pay attention to.

[verisimilidude]

Exactly. For most people, that's probably enough. I couldn't see the business case for creating a whole social network out of the concept.

For myself though, I could easily see creating 9 or 10 cards for different situations. It'd be nice to have an easy way to manage all that.

[joering2]

What you need is an "premium" email at a "premium e-mail provider". :)

You signed up as Joe Doe and plug your basic info: website url, physical address, your real email address, phone number cell phone, etc. All this can be in multitude quantity, like your email: office job 1, office job 2, personal. All this info is confidential and only seen to you.

Then your conference comes in. You click "create addresses" and system is randomly generating your email addresses, like this:

[e-mail]

[e-mail]

[e-mail]

[e-mail]

Then for each email you can setup few options, like:

- forward this email to office job 1

- forward this email to office job 2

- forward this email to my personal email

- if someone emails me at this email, send them autoreply with short profile: my homepage url, my pshysical address, my office phone, but no cell phone.

- if someone emails me at this email, send them autoreply with my personal cellphone.

When forwarding your email you can have optional header, such as extra info you added initially: "this is my Word Expo 2014". Then when 2016 comes in and you receive an email, header tells you the origin of it.

You can setup any email to hold on mail and not forward it at all and just notify you once a week/month/once there is X emails awaiting.

At any point you can dispose an email or simply set it to auto-expire. Or change its settings for that matter.

You have two options when it comes to your presentatione. You can go high tech and print (or request print) of business cards with QR code where each code is your CRF card with different email of course. In this scenario you could have different color of qr code representing different email setup and just memorize: green qr code - potential investors, yellow qr code - potential employees, blue qr code - cute blonde that i think likes me!

Or even simplier solution: order yourself a few thousand business cards with your email address like this: "[e-mail]" and then just write down the email number after the pre-printed part of your email address that will match particular premium email #. And if someone asks about it, just tell them a perfect excuse: "oh yeah i get so much spam that once a year i have to create a new email for myself".

Someone building such a system could call it similar to gmail so your emails look normal, like maybe pmail.com (for "premium" mail) or something like it.

I think the problem is that this is very niche market. I am sure for a right solution you would pay even $99 per year, but again it would be hard to market and even harder to make some money long-term off of it :)

[davmre]

You can actually do this with gmail itself: [e-mail] is a valid alias for [e-mail], for any value of x. So you can make up whatever set of custom addresses you want; they all go to the same account, and filtering/forwarding/etc. can be done with standard gmail filters (not sure about autoresponses; you'd probably need a third-party client for that).

Of course this plus-sign behavior is a pretty well-known fact about Gmail, so it'll be obvious that you're bucketing your email in this way. Anyone can easily read off the 'base' address [e-mail], so you'd need to set it up so that mail to this address is heavily restricted and anyone wanting to actually reach you would have to use [e-mail] or whatever. But I think this would basically also be true of any custom service you could invent having similar functionality.

[PeterWhittaker]

But gmail basically does this now with the +: [e-mail], [e-mail], etc.

[joering2]

Exactly. Anyone know this "trick" so I can envision people that didnt have the response back in a day or two, just remove the + part thinking exactly what you said -- my email went to some less-important folder.

I, for example, always remove the + part. Not sure why, just a behavior. Even if wrong, still it is what it is.

Besides, I don't think you can discard your email. So if you had [e-mail] and month later you decided you don't want anymore email from this account, you would have to setup rule for this email to go to spam, which is not a perfect scenario. Better would be an auto-response that e-mail expired. Something like PlutoMail is doing.

[Swizec]

> If any of you can figure out how to make this work, I'd definitely pay for it.

I don't give out business cards. I tell people to google me and send me an email or a tweet or whatever they end up finding.

This filters out everyone who doesn't have a really good reason to contact me because they just won't care enough to invest the 30s of extra time it takes to type "swizec" into google and click a link.

[samastur]

I think the main purpose of business cards today is to serve as a physical reminder of who you met, not to provide you contact info which can be found elsewhere.

Memory is not the best keeper of information at conferences where you might meet tens of people.

[soneca]

Well, based on the thread I created a quick mockup of the app I envisioned: http://invis.io/9K181IPES

If anyone cares to contribute (or develop), feel free.

[nslamberth]

A social network used explicitly for exchanging contact information would fill a perfect niche for me.

That idea is fantastic.

[qq66]

You can use Facebook to accomplish everything you can do with your social network. Make your profile 2-3 sentences and your current city, allow people to request to see email, and just ignore the feed.

The advantage of course is that there's about a billion people already on it.

[kasey_junk]

I actually figured out a domain for this idea before I gave up. The problem is I can't figure out how it scales correctly. It ideally would A) have strong network effects B) you would get contact data through your interfaces of choice (iphone, email address book, gmail, android, etc) and would rarely if ever interact with a web gui for the service. It should also have a circles concept so that I can give different people different details.

those all seem to rule out the various business models. hope someone smarter than me figures it out.

[jlees]

You need to find a set of people who are connected and connectors, and who have this kind of problem in spades. Then build in sufficient virality so they all start using it, and as you point out, multi-platform presence. Many folks have tried to replace the business card and failed, but I've seen cards with custom URLs rather than contact details on them; maybe that's one way to go. (QR codes require too much friction.)

[simpixelated]

subscription?

[kasey_junk]

Limits the network effect dramatically. Best I could come up with was some sort of power user tools or something.

[lepht]

Cobook sort of seemed to be going in this direction, but they got acquired by FullContact:

https://cobook.co/pete

[sp332]

Something like the .tel domain? http://telnic.org/ You don't get to run your own server, all .tel domains are run by the same company. You just set up yourname.tel with your contact info. Example: http://mark.tel/

[jarek]

http://mark.tel (and about.me mentioned in another comment) is a prime example of a problem with using given names/last names to form URLs to share contact information. Say you get http://smith.tel - this is great for you but bad for every other Smith out there. http://mark.smith.tel doesn't solve it either.

OTOH using some sort of central-issued IDs (NI, kennitala, PESEL, SSN, INSEE, passport number) like http://87120402424.pl.tel feels a bit dystopian...

[yutah]

everyone should be issued an IPv6 address at birth

[spullara]

That was called Plaxo.

[silverlake]

It's still around and does exactly what this thread is asking for. http://plaxo.com

[krapp]

Are microformats still a thing? Because business cards as a social network sounds like a great idea.

[jlees]

This (and sister comments to mine) are super interesting, we're working on this problem space - with a professional focus - and there are a bunch of folks in the consumer side too. Happy to chat to anyone interested in solving this sort of problem.

[eitally]

I had high hopes that http://about.me would shape up to be this, but ... nope.

http://about.me/eitally

[Cederfjard]

Why isn't it? Simply too little adoption, or are they doing something wrong?

[drdeadringer]

> a rolodex social network

As someone who recently came across an actual rolodex, with both typed and hand-written notations throughout, this idea sounds like something I'd seriously consider signing up for.

[arebop]

https://code.google.com/p/webfinger/?

[pwelch]

Agreed. I actually enjoy email but would really like a great App/SaaS that would be a good rolodex.

[smegel]

> and signing up for newsletters and/or updates on various subjects

I still think RSS trumps email for this...

[jabelk]

Agree, but I like having everything in one place. I don't get a lot of email, so that may change, but I have a filter and separate inbox[1] set up for stuff I read, including RSS.

[1]http://klinger.io/post/71640845938/dont-drown-in-email-how-t...

[SapphireSun]

Isn't this basically the same as your email contacts list with a free text field?

[jabelk]

No, because people have too damn many email addresses.

I typically have multiple email addresses at all times, with one constant (my gmail) and the others revolving around my employer, my school, and other affiliations. And which email I give you depends on how I know you (I'll give classmates and potential employers the university one, etc). So even though I might have someone's corporate address, if they change companies, I'm SOL. With this service, I can click your "request email" button, and you tell me the most convenient address to reach you at.

[rplnt]

> I have absolute control of my inbox with filters, labels, and signing up for newsletters and/or updates on various subjects.

I see you are not using gmail.

[state]

We'll build it. Don't worry.

[minikites]

Didn't tent.io try this?