

Brewster: Hyperconnected Mobile Address Book - worldvoyageur
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/07/brewster.html

======
olivercameron
Our team built a very similar product to Brewster, which shared many of the
same features. We discovered a lot of issues with building an iOS address book
replacement, and we never launched the product for those reasons.

1) You cannot access the recent calls list. Most people don't use their
address book to keep in touch, but rather use their recent calls list. Not
being able to access that list means that a huge number of people can't
replace the default address book with your product.

2) You cannot be the default. Whenever I make a call, I am kicked back into
the built-in Phone.app. This is incredibly confusing for users.

3) It's a momentous performance challenge. When users open the default Phone
app, their contacts appear instantaneously. If you want to replace the
default, you need to be sure that your address book does whatever it needs to
insanely fast. We managed to get the process of syncing an address book down
to seconds, but Brewster has unfortunately taken nearly an hour for me. Many,
many people will drop out at this point and think the app is broken.

4) It's an enterprise product. Most people's address books are incredibly tiny
and include bad data (nicknames, just first names, no names at all), which
makes it very hard for a service to provide any type of value add. The only
place where you can do an excellent job is for people with thousands of
contacts.

5) Privacy concerns. For a product like this to have a great value add, you
need to provide the service with a ton of personal data. You need my Facebook,
you need my email, you need my address book and much more. Many folks will see
this and drop out of the app right then and there.

It might be possible to get around these hurdles, but Brewster has a long way
to go.

------
polyfractal
Color me unimpressed. I've found myself degenerating to simpler address books
as my online life get's more complex.

As a perfect example, the first thing I did when I got a smartphone was hook
it up to Facebook. Then I discovered a thousand useless Facebook contacts had
been downloaded into my address book. Finding people who I actually wanted to
call or text became a nightmare.

I recently uninstalled Facebook from my phone because of the whole address
book fiasco. I'm back to a simple list of contacts that I know personally -
and it's great.

I'm probably just being a Luddite. I want an address book so I can quickly
call Ted. Not so I can wade through all my Facebook, Twitter, Google+,
LinkedIn, Foursquare, <Insert Social Service> friends while attempting to call
Ted.

~~~
kulkarnic
As Herb Simon wrote (in 1971!) "a wealth of information creates a poverty of
attention".

The problem you describe is that "smart" address books are actually quite
dumb-- they don't understand the context. When you're just trying to call Ted,
you don't really care how many mutual friends you have. The solution is
actually well-known in the literature for a long time: focus+context (and
relatedly overview +details on demand). Show the caller an easy way to get to
Ted's number, stat. The rest is just context, which should really only be
shown when the user wants to know more about Ted.

Side thought: maybe, what would be useful are phones that guess who you want
to call. Instead of the "most recent" list on a phone, maybe you want a "most
likely to call now".

~~~
nooneelse
If it has a guess for "most likely to call now", go ahead and give it a "I'm
feeling lucky" button.

And speaking of Google, they have a "Gesture Search" app that I use all the
time to find contacts which I don't think will be on the top of the recent
calls list. Usually it doesn't take more than one poorly drawn character at
the start of someone's name to have them near the top of the result list.
Search, don't sort, and all that.

------
mgkimsal
"That's what we are always looking for, someone who just can't sleep because
they want to fix something that isn't working in their world and have been
trying for a long time to fix it."

I'm so mixed on this. I've run in to a number of people who've spent months
and sometimes years trying to 'fix something that isn't working in their
world', and it's _usually_ because they don't really understand the industry,
or how people really work, or they've not investigated the options out there
which already exist (or which have already failed).

Not saying Brewster necessarily falls in to that camp, and I get that you'd
want to fund people with passion, but... sometimes spending a lot of time
fixing problems that keep you up at night just... isn't a good use of your
time. It's generally only in hindsight that you can make that judgement, but
writing this sort of stuff seems to encourage that sort of behaviour.

------
mdonahoe
1\. Brewster.com was down for me.

2\. The app slurped up all my accounts and then told me to leave.. They would
message me when everything was ready.

3\. I got a message 20 minutes later.

4\. I opened the app and saw a grid of flashing gray blocks. Some blocks had
names of my contacts on them.

5\. No photos loaded, but the blocks kept flashing.

6\. The app asked me to select my favorite contacts. What the hell?! Aren't
you supposed to auto magically figure that out?

7\. I couldn't find my wife in the giant list.

8\. The contacts seemed to be in completely random order. People I had
forgotten about were at the top of the list.

Maybe the demand spike caused a server failure, but I am disappointed.

~~~
mdonahoe
I tried again today and it seem to work. The wife was at the top of the list
this time.

------
farmerliao
Is anyone clear how Brewster plans to monetize? Sorry for asking such a
question, but before I sign over my entire contact life to them just curious
about why they plan to do with my data. I've read the EULA and its seems
pretty typical for a company who plans to sell all my data to some third
party.

------
huragok
Doesn't seem like the app is available in the AU app store. Looks pretty good
though.

~~~
redrory
Or the Jamaican App Store.. why?

