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by timjahn 4325 days ago
"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.

12 comments

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".

"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.

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.
> 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.

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

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.
which is good. i don't want some guy i met at a work thing once adding himself to my best friends circle.
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.
In the early days it allowed "I don't even know this person" as a reason.
yeah. Linkedin needs to implement this. Just a way to add notes that are only view-able to me would solve the problem.
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.
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.

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...

Would you trust them enough to be certain enough that it would always stay this way so you could safely put slanderous information about a person here? I certainly wouldn't.
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.

Too much work for the user or the developer?
huh, cool. that's what I was asking for.
> 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”.

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.

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.
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.

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

"Why they're important". I feel like that is a pretty tough one to generalize.
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.
I just meant it felt kind of creepy.
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?

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?

How much would you pay? I might build that.
It's called "Contacts.app".
Plaxo?