

Inkling launches anti-bloat collaboration tool. "Email's just fine" - tgethr.com - nate
http://blog.tgethr.com/post/124643305/get-tgethr

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ryanvm
I like it. I think simplistic interfaces are the way to go for
collaborative/social apps.

The downside of course is that it's dead easy to clone these simple apps (like
Twitter, TinyURL, etc.), which means the barrier to entry for your competition
is quite low. This effect has been recently amplified with the boom in quality
frameworks and dirt cheap infrastructure (EC2, App Engine).

The end result is that making a killer web app is not enough and you instead
have to make sure you nail the social marketing of it and build up a large
enough userbase that the brand/userbase becomes the real value.

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teej
"The downside of course is that it's dead easy to clone these simple apps"

Yes, it's easy to clone the features of these apps. So don't compete on
features, compete on user experience.

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apgwoz
I think this is probably more of a "get some press with a simple but effective
idea" more than it's something they'll IPO off of.

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100k
Cool idea. It's like you took the problem Basecamp is trying to solve and went
the exact opposite way.

37signals says "We hate email! Collaborate on the web!"

Tgethr says "We love email! Just archive it better!"

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DougWebb
Wouldn't an NNTP server with an SMTP gateway and HTTP client serve basically
the same purpose?

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byrneseyeview
Think of it as a way to pay a nominal sum of money in order to not care what
any of that means.

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gchpaco
Or to deal with administering any of it...

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omouse
So it's similar to a mailing list?

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pierattt
I was just telling someone last night that in my experience, 90% of the people
using Basecamp are just using it for the threaded messaging, and if we could
improve on that and offer it as a separate product, we'd do pretty well.

This is fantastic and I'll almost certainly be using it.

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dabeeeenster
That pretty much describes Google Wave...

Oh, and I agree about Basecamp. I've only ever seen it used for message
archive and the odd file sharing task.

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trickjarrett
I like the concept, actually I love the concept.

One of my concerns though is that the email is not easy to give out. "No no
it's together, but drop the o and the last e."

We'll see though, I'll give it a try.

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nate
To short circuit any confusion, right now these tgethr groups are private and
more private :) (using email encryption). You can't give out a tgethr address
to people outside of your group and have them be able to email that address.
Though we are attracted to this feature, it obviously opens up the group to
spam which seems to still plague Google Groups. Still pondering this one.

Currently for this purpose of a public@somewhere.com (like our support@ type
emails at Inkling), we use Tender (tenderapp.com) which does a great job
already of managing a public discussion, support queues, etc.

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trickjarrett
Ah that does clarify it a bit, now I understand, thanks!

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gojomo
Very similar to ccBetty:

<http://www.ccbetty.com/>

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nate
I do not intend to disparage ccBetty in anyway, haven't used their service
enough. I'm sure there's some users that will find their service great.

But mainly we wanted something to do secure business collaboration (all
traffic over SSL, and the ability to S/Mime encrypt all the email traffic for
example). We also wanted reusable group email addresses
"somewhere@tgethr.com", instead of looking up a crap load of email addresses
or everyone being forced to create their own groups of email addresses in
address books all over the place.

We also wanted a dead simple way to manage multiple of these groups and not
feel forced to use a webapp to use the tool well. Didn't find the solution to
all these wants out there, and we feel we have a knack - our opinion of course
:) - of doing simple web apps for business, so we gave it a go of making
something that works for us.

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prakash
IMHO, you have too many buying options. I would probably have 3.

1\. free

2\. Combine the "basic", "plus" & "family" -- price it at $24

3\. Combine "business basic" & "business pro" -- charge it at $99

Congrats on your launch!

