

Everyme (YC S11) Launches Mobile App That Aims To Get Social Circles Right - olivercameron
http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/10/everyme-launch/

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pclark
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.

~~~
chaosprophet
> 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.

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gregoire
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...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/18/andreessen-horowitz-crunchfund-
tencent-back-intelligent-social-address-book-everyme/).

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.

~~~
mkuhn
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!

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motti_s
_"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.

~~~
joeguilmette
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.

~~~
frabcus
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.

------
yangez
>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.

~~~
fieldforceapp
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?

~~~
BadCookie
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!

------
thesash
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.

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motti_s
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.

~~~
alttab
Consolidation-athon?

------
newhouseb
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...

~~~
vnorby
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.

~~~
newhouseb
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.

~~~
vnorby
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.

~~~
samstave
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.

~~~
vnorby
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.

------
luser001
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.

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mikepmalai
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.

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

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

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adeelk
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.

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shootthemoon
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.

~~~
AznHisoka
most grandmas don't use smartphones...

~~~
DanBC
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.

~~~
pmjordan
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).

------
ianedwards
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.

