Do I know thee?

Do I Know Thee? Available now in the Chrome Store.

Problem addressed: Hundreds of non-spam emails per day. No way to tell which ones come from people I know.

Solution built: Do I know Thee? Empowered by Singly  is available now in the Chrome Store. When you open up your inbox, any email from someone whom you aren’t connected to on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram will appear grayed out. This will highlight the emails from your real contacts, empowering you to move ever more quickly toward that elusive world of INBOX ZERO.

After Life

Problem addressed: Too much noise in my feeds across services

Solution built: After Life Empowered by Singly. A web app that shows posts from various people in your networks without telling you who posted them. If you drag them up, they go to “Heaven,” and if you drag them down they go to “Hell.” It’s a fun game that will shed light on the people in your networks whom you might not need to be subscribing to.

Foodie Finder

Foodie Finder

Problem addressed: Too many great restaurants. Yelp doesn’t help me see where people whose opinions I trust are eating out.

Solution built: Foodie Finder Empowered by Singly. A mobile app that provides a stream of restaurants – and only restaurants – where your friends have checked in or taken photos. Next-step features would be the ability to curate a list of specific people whose food tastes you trust. This one didn’t make it into the App Store yesterday, but it still looked pretty good.

Also, don’t forget to register for our $10,000 App Challenge:

AfterLife (Temas + Beau)

Problem: Too much noise in my feeds across services

Solution: Present feed in a visually appealing way with basic info from each post. I can drag each post up to “heaven” or down to “hell.” I can later see if lots of posts from a specific user went to hell, in which case I may want to remove that person from my social graph.

Foodie Follower (Tyler + Kristján)

Problem: Too many great restaurants. Yelp doesn’t help me see where people whose opinions I trust are eating out.

Solution: Select a set of people in your network whose food preferences you trust, and see the restaurants where they check in, post photos, etc.

Do I know? (Simon, Jer, Sash)

Problem: I receive hundreds of non-spam emails each day. I need a way to know if I know the people who are emailing me.

Solution: A lightweight email app. I click a “Do I Know?” button, and the app checks all my networks, and pops up a red or green light next to each. If I get a red light on each service, I likely don’t know the person.
Check back later for updates on the progress of our apps. And, while you’re here, sign up for our $10,000 App Challenge:

May 02, 2012 @ 5:29p

PostFirst is live! Add it to your browser here: http://bit.ly/IVRAiu  If you love it, tweet @postfirst.

No word on the other apps.  More to come pre-demo.

***Update 2***

May 02, 2012 @ 4:44p.

PostFirst is almost in the Chrome Store — Kristjan is filling out the form right now.

ShouldertApp has a Launchrock sign-up page running.  http://signup.shouldertapp.me/

Vacat.io has successfully crunched my data and told me that the first time I did anything on Facebook or Twitter was in November 26, 2004.  This information alone makes this my favorite app of the day thus far.

There’s a 6p hardstop to begin demos.

***Update 1***

May 02, 2012 @ 2:33p.  Beau’s project, Vacat.io goes live!

Problem: Beau doesn’t remember or know how much time he spends away from the internet… and he’s a bit worried about it!

Solution:  Build an app that uses your social media check-ins as a proxy for the time or moments that you aren’t on the internet.  If you’re not checking in, tweeting, posting a photo, etc then you might be asleep. The goal is to track this information and use it to inform how much time you should spend away from the glowing screen — that’s right, away.

Follow @needsvacatio to vote for Beau’s app!  Better yet, visit: http://vacat.io/

***Update 0***

May, 02, 2012 @ 10:30a.

The Singly crew officially hit an API deadline.  Our internal hack day.  Today we came to the office, pitched app ideas, and paired off into teams to build them using Singly’s API.  The goal is to identify all of the good, bad, and the uglies of our API.

Expect a full breakdown of what we learned from our Developer Ambassador-in-Chief, Simon Murtha-Smith (github: smurthas, twitter: smurthas), before the end of the week.  In the meantime, here’s a brief overview of the teams and their products — all of them built (quickly and simply) using the Singly API to capture normalized personal data from all over the web.

All of our work today is leading up to a May 10th Friends-of-Singly hack night.  We’re putting our tech to the test with our most talented friends on that night.

TL;DR (Blog taken over by Schutte).

Lindsay (@lschutte) + Kristjan (@kripet) + Kiko the Dog

We’re building a Chrome browser extension called PostFirst.  

Problem: We have a lot of friends.  They share a lot of links from all over the web.  How do we keep from sharing a link that our friends have already shared or seen?

Solution: A little browser extension that combs through your links from across different feeds (Twitter, Facebook, etc) and tells you if the link you’re about to share has already been shared on your network.

Remember how, on the interweb, the entire world likes to say, “First!” Well, this extension ensures that’s true.

Vote for Lindsay, Kristjan, and PostFirst by following us on Twitter @Postfirst!

Austin, Smurthas, + Temas

Meet ShouldertApp

Problem: Stop the madness! And the notifications.  The number of notifications that come through on my phone makes me insane.  I only want to hear from people who aren’t part of my inner-circle.

Solution: Select an inner-circle, the people who you really want to see notifications from, and when they take actions on any network (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc), then I find out.  Anything else: nada.

Vote for ShouldertApp by following them @ShouldertApp.  (But, don’t really follow them, because I’m on the @PostFirst team and I don’t want them to win. So, follow me! Me!)

Tyler + Beau

They are both working on their own projects, but aren’t available for updates.  Since they don’t have any business people on their teams, I’m fairly certain they don’t have Twitter accounts and therefore aren’t eligible for voting.

More later. (And vote for @Postfirst!)

Here’s the agenda:

Saturday, June 2

10:30 am: Coffee
11:00 am: Introduction, event rundown + API workshop
12 noon: Break away, make teams and start hacking.
6:00 pm: Hot pizza + cold beer
12 midnight: Cold pizza + hot beer
2:00 am: You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.

Sunday, June 3

10:30 am: Coffee + hacking
4:00 pm: Hard deadline. All projects must be in thier presentable state.
4:15 pm: Demos!
6:00 pm: Judges disperse, Food
7:00 pm: Winners announced – prizes awarded ($10k to winning team, other prizes tbd)

Until that post, for everyone who comes here, we want to get the word out about our first Official API hackathon where winners will walk away with $10,000.  To support our push for a simpler, more personal web, we’re putting our energy into being the most loved, developer friendly product and company in the market.  If you are a developer, join our mailing list, follow us on Twitter — even come work out of our office (see our Facebook page).  This is just the beginning.

It’s inspiring, but it’s also a little disappointing. Wolfram only has this view because 20 years ago he started keeping track. He kept email archives and meeting schedules, logged his phone calls and started wearing a pedometer. If you were to start  today, you wouldn’t have that wealth of data for years to come. Luckily, you didn’t start today, you just might not have noticed when you started. If you use webmail, you’ve got email since the day you made the account (you don’t delete anything, right?). Your phone has a call history in it, and might already tell you who your favorite people are. Your accounts on social sites are a running log of your thoughts and activities. Your data is everywhere.

There’s the other problem: your data is everywhere. Without a good deal of effort, you can’t mash sleep measurements with your calendar to see when work stresses you out. You can’t rationalize the $25 you spent at the bar you checked into with the exercise you recorded on the dance floor. All of your data is somewhere else—actually many somewheres—which is the problem the Locker Project and similar efforts are trying to solve. Once you put all of your data in one place, you can analyze it ’til the cows come home, which your location history tells you they do slightly faster when the wind is in the right direction.

The past few years have seen plenty of personal analytics products pop up, so it’s safe to say people are interested in this stuff—but wait, there’s more. With what you know about your friends, or the data they’ll share with you, you get a whole new layer of social analytics. And forget analytics; you get a whole new universe of interactions. You get warned that all your friends already saw the link you’re about to post. Your friends and family pool their data to build an ongoing birthday scrapbook containing every photo taken at every place you’ve been together. Your doctor calls because you have a genetic marker for high blood pressure and haven’t been jogging much since all those restaurants on your vacation.

It’s nifty in the extreme what Wolfram put together, and there’s a lot more low-hanging fruit for personal analytics and everything you can learn from it. Just don’t make the mistake of thinking it ends there.

His team is on a tight deadline to finish their project (which can be found here: getgaggle.com), so he didn’t have time to write a blog post today. But I got him on the phone for five minutes – after a few battles with the spotty cell service where he is. Here’s an update on his wild adventure:

He said yesterday feels like an eternity ago. In the morning, they crystallized their team and their idea, and then they spent the day with their heads down writing code.

The idea: Gaggle. It’s a way for you to aggregate content created by specific people during a specific period of time. For instance, SXSW. If you have 25 friends going to Austin this weekend, you can use Gaggle to send each of them a short URL where they can connect the services. Throughout the weekend, you can check Gaggle and see the check-ins, photos and posts from everyone in your group.

If you see a photo of a great party, you’ll know where you want to go. If you want to see where your friends are, just log in to Gaggle and you can see their check-ins. Then, after the weekend, the data remains on Gaggle as a 21st century scrapbook of the event.

So, the three of them divided the labor and started building.

They stopped for lunch and to use the workspace at Gangplank, a collaborative workspace in Chandler, AZ. Simon said they space is wonderful and the concept is inspiring. Members pay no money, but everyone chips in to help raise funds and keep the office in good shape. Also, he said they had great BBQ there.

Back on the road, they spent the afternoon coding. After being confronted by a dust storm so severe that the highway was closed, they had to pull over for a bit (though the software development never slowed during the storm.

They got to a hotel in New Mexico last night, and the stability of being off the road and indoors offered too productive of an atmosphere – so they stayed up all night working.

Gaggle is at the point where all three team members have built thier respective parts, and they are beginning to peice it all together. They have a tight deadline tomorrow, and it sounds like they will be working right up to the last moment.

Check back soon for more updates!

If you have questions for him, or just want to compliment him on this performance, just email tyler (at) singly (dot) com.

One of our founders, Simon Murtha-Smith (or @smurthas), took off Tuesday on the San Francisco Startup Bus to SXSWi. The mission is for everyone on the bus to spawn a startup in the 3 days they have together on the road. Check back here each day for updates on his adventure.

Day starts at 6am in SOMA, high energy, 1 Scoblizer, 1 TechCrunch camera man. We load the bus, get going, and stop to pick up late comers on the Embarcadero. Hit the 101 south as the sun rises to eLance, in Mountain View, while the buspreneurs do the usual “Hi my name is…and I do X”. Breakfast at eLance, then back on the bus — pitches. One minute each: problem statement –> solution statement. After the pitches, we stop in a parking lot on the side of the highway to mingle and talk with each other. We’ve got max 30 mins to form teams and then back on the bus to get to work. The group starts with about 4 teams, later to become 6 through mergers and break ups. I started with a 9 person team working on “tell a story of an experience in retrospect, via the digital artifacts + some human narrative”. Our nine people split into two teams (half to work on a different idea). Over the course of a few hours, a few people move around teams.

OH: “you wouldn’t believe our up and to the right metrics”…”oh ya? Is that for the number of people leaving your team?” #startupbus

— Simon Murtha-Smith (@smurthas) March 6, 2012

We spend the day working to crystalize idea, get to LA around 5, and hit the streeeeetz for some straight up customer development. We ask a bunch of people walking by questions like “Do you feel that a simple Facebook photo album tells the whole story of your experience at an event?” and “How do you share photos with family and friends?”. This is hands down the most incredible experience of the day — oh, the bits of your brain that start firing when you hear what people have to say!

After a pivot while on the streets and another pivot back on the bus, we settle on something we like to call Gaggle: and easier way to stay up to date with the friends you are travelling with.

We arrive around 9pm at the Super 8 (Motel 6? Who knows after that long on a bus) order some pizzas and…get to work. The coding goes into full gear when the bus stops, because productivity goes up 10-fold when your computer is stationary. Tomorrow morning at 6a, we’ll hit the road again, headed for New Mexcio.

Boom.