

Matt Cutts gives you a free startup idea - alphadog
http://www.google.com/buzz/109412257237874861202/Tu7U17YACA8/Heres-another-start-up-idea-Jeff-Jarvis-recently

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dstein
Except I think startups are collectively figuring out that creating a company
solely around an API plugin isn't a very solid business plan.

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qeorge
Not sure that applies here. Even if Gmail discountinued OAuth support, you
could just fall back to IMAP.

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wavesplash
As the ecosystem around Twitter has discovered, the platform owners will
sooner copy a good feature than buy it if it's cheap enough to build. It's not
about OAuth or IMAP, it's about some GOOG PM copying the featureset and
putting it in the MRD for the next release.

[edit: a famous bit of company-is-a-feature carnage for reference: STAC vs.
Microsoft: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics> ]

Which makes me wonder why Matt can't get this championed internally or for
someone's 20% project?

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fauigerzigerk
I think that depends on how sophisticated a service is. I agree that applying
some regular expressions to emails is not enough to make any other company buy
you instead of building it themselves. But that holds for almost anything a
startup can do.

Startups need to solve difficult problems or they are nothing more than
marketing firms trying to create a hype around hot air. Filtering email
intelligently, including automatic anonymization of sensitive parts within the
email, can be a difficult problem to solve, and I think there are many types
of email integration that a startup could tackle based on the approach Matt
suggests.

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Matt_Cutts
With this kind of positive feedback, maybe I'll post more in the future.

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sown
I wasn't aware that gmail had an API that would allow me to parse mail like he
wants. Is it supposed to be a greasmonkey script+server side stuff>?

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vampirical
Their OAuth for IMAP/SMTP should be all you need:
<http://code.google.com/apis/gmail/oauth/>

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sown
I learn something new every day. Thanks for that!

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ronnier
Seems like a neat idea, but I'd rather that functionality be handled by gmail
rather than a 3rd party.

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Timothee
It sounds like it _should_ be handled by Gmail in their OAuth access
implementation. As described in the post, it sounds kind of scary that by
giving access to Gmail, you give access to all your account with no
granularity whatsoever.

Gmail could do that by pairing the OAuth access with a set of permissions
which would basically be the filters Matt describes. The way other services
(Facebook comes to mind) are doing it basically.

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minalecs
agree, as much as I love the idea, theres no way I want to allow anyone other
than google to have access to my email. They would essentially be able to
mine.. all my bills, expenses, and income, all my contacts and plans.. etc
pretty much have access to my entire life.. yes I know google does, but giving
it to google is much better than giving it to some startup who may not be
around a year from now, and decide to sell all this data to the highest
bidder, and who knows where else that will go.

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auxbuss
I think we're in Diaspora territory again, where I want to own the data and
allow access to you via my own criteria.

I've been baulking at Firefox 4's "sync" today because the data is on their
server with their key. A bit 1990's me thinks.

There's no way I'm trusting my email, or anyone else's, to another third
party.

I imagine I manage this like most folk, I forward gmail to my server and
procmail from there. Works great.

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mgunes
Firefox Sync encrypts the data locally, and you can run your own server.
There's actually a simplified one for running on your own home server (as
opposed to the large Mozilla infrastructure).

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pbiggar
In addition, the server and all infrastructure, are completely open source.
Mozilla doesn't really build anything that it can't open source.

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vaksel
this should probably just get paired with an email parser, as in you setup a
filter, and tell it what piece of data to look for, and that's the only data
that's made available.

i dunno about others, but I wouldn't want some third party site to get the
full email with my name/address for example.

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volodia
Maybe I didn't understand something, but it seems to me that companies like
Blippy would have to change something in their code to link with your server
instead of Gmail. If it's the case, it would be hard to get everyone to adopt
this system.

Or if it's not the case, could someone explain to me how linking the startup
server with other companies would work? (Unfortunately, I'm not very familiar
with the technologies mentioned in the article.)

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yef
How much money does procmail make?

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eduardo_f
I have the oauth stuff already working in my app (different app, using php and
ruby). I can help get this done (or a similar idea) very quickly. Get in touch
with me if interested (email in profile).

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scharan
Not sure if its a great business plan, but its something that I have been
looking around for quite sometime now. Very useful idea!

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AlexBlom
*waiting 6 months for all of the 'review my startup' threads

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lachyg
You'd hope someone could have an MVP up within a week or two!

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aneth
Otherinbox is on this track. They can create calendar entries automatically
from emails.

I stopped using them because I didn't like the opt-out style of filtering, but
the technology is cool.

