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Show HN: Monica, an open-source CRM to manage friends and family

monicahq.com

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Re: Show HN: Monica, an open-source CRM to manage friends and family

#331

Post by samstave »

robinhood wrote: post #283
lakerz16 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered the ability to "Share" a Contact? For example, if my Wife wants to share the info she collected about our niece? Or is the entire idea that each person is logging a unique POV or set of information about someone, rather than the system gravitating towards there being a single, cultivated profile about each person that is shared around? (right now it's kind of the anti social media -- which seems l…

Instead of sharing, I wonder if I should add multi users to an account, so you and your spouse could manage their relationships with their loved ones, for instance.

+1

Re: Show HN: Monica, an open-source CRM to manage friends and family

#333

Post by learc83 »

jackarg wrote: post #327
danielvf wrote: post #115

My uncle died suddenly this year. He was unbelievably caring - and not just to family - but to everyone he ever met. His funeral was jam packed with everyone from homeless people to executives of multi-billion dollar companies. I always thought that his ability to always have you, and whatever you had last talked about with him, on his mind at any moment was some kind of supernatural gift. I was surprised to find out…

If you want to become a generous person such as him, when do you know when you've reached a limit in compassion? Would someone like your uncle ever think, for someone who is excessively rude, uncaring, disagreeable, unfriendly: "he is not worth my time, I should move on?"

You don't have to be best friends with someone like that to be kind to them.

I think the limit should be in allowing that person to take advantage of your kindness.

Re: Show HN: Monica, an open-source CRM to manage friends and family

#334

Post by wsinks »

robinhood wrote: post #55
CrossWired wrote: post #49

Love the idea, would like to see: * Imports from Facebook or CardDav, one at a time is horrendous. * Relate contact to Social Facebook/LinkedIn/Meetup? * Add activity from LinkedIn/Facebook other social sites to contacts * Native App

I think import seems to be the number 1 feature request. Makes a lot of sense. Add activity from FB/Linkedin: How would you do that?

I wouldn't add activity - I would force people to not bloat their own and log it themselves.

Re: Show HN: Monica, an open-source CRM to manage friends and family

#335

Post by immy »

robinhood wrote: post #48
wink wrote: post #35

Call me cynical, but I find the term CRM pretty wrong. Yes, I understand what it does, people have been keeping track of this stuff (if I read the intro page correctly) for ages, and still I find this borderline creepy and overengineered. Disclaimer: I am using e.g. Facebook's "On this day" feature to reminisce about old stuff with friends, I also keep birthdays in a calendar. Maybe just the professional spin puts me…

I understand what you mean. I don't like it either, but I've yet to find another way of explaining quickly what it does. A CRM for friends is very explanatory. But I dislike the creepiness of it.

It's not creepy to me. I was using Bond (http://www.getbond.co) but its interaction wasn't designed very well.

Re: Show HN: Monica, an open-source CRM to manage friends and family

#336

Post by losteric »

WorldMaker wrote: post #235
kbenson wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that I hate Zuckerberg that I find it hard to use Facebook, but that I trust them less than the other super-presences outs there (justified or not), and I dislike how it changes my perceptions of some of my friends. The constant posting of inane shit starts to look less like keeping in touch and more like an addiction to my eyes. I still like those people, and enjoy their company, but being constantly expose…

I still sometimes wonder if anyone else has a good name for what Facebook lost somewhere in the switch between the much more ephemeral "Status" system of 2004's TheFacebook to today's "Posts" and their littered, ad-filled home the "News Feed". Even the "Notes" system in the middle of the transition was more "opt in" than firehose and a bit more rare and curated by the fewer users using it. There is a spirit to the ol…

Separation of responsibilities?

Statuses were great as a brief update of a friend's change in their state of mind. I could follow up as I saw fit, often just keeping it in mind for the next time we met up.

Posts and news is just a steady steam of information... repeated opinions, content that forms their opinion, attempts at converting others, or minor events that would have been interesting to talk about but bland now that I've seen the highlights online... Often in impersonal monologue form, or equally impersonal many-to-many chat.

Those features gutted the middle of the friend spectrum, their UX no longer aligns with natural social patterns. Humans talk more and about different things as we become closer friend's, slowly acclimating to each other. Facebook is optimized for tight social groups. News posts are useful for my inner group, but I had to unfriend most of my more nebulous connections because their updates were basically spam in the context of my life.

Facebook's features no doubt provides better revenue from ads/targeted spam for shareholders, but they've lost what I found useful for networking and developing new relations. If anything, their new features are impediments.

At this point, I've completely dropped Facebook in favor of email and chat (mix of apps)... It's a better experience than Facebook news and posts, obvious data privacy wins, and my friends and I can share higher resolution pictures without coupling to any specific platform. I haven't found a good alternative for networking, aside from LinkedIn (okish) and plain ol' phone calls/sms/in-store meetups. Maybe that's the best there is.

Re: Show HN: Monica, an open-source CRM to manage friends and family

#337

Post by robinhood »

tombot wrote: post #320

I think this product is Fantastic. One of the main jobs I hire FB for is Birthdays, looking forward to using this: Few tiny feature requests: - Make the of the page the person you are looking at, really helps with multiple tabs. - Filters for Gender & more options for non-binary Gender would be great. - Just been adding a bunch of contacts, a tiny help would be when pasting a name into first name, to split on space a…

Thanks a lot!

Excellent idea about the tab. I've created an issue about it (https://github.com/monicahq/monica/issues/45). For the other stuff, it was already on the pipeline. Thanks :-D

Re: Show HN: Monica, an open-source CRM to manage friends and family

#338

Post by robinhood »

phantomlord wrote: post #298

I would be very much interested in developing an Android app for this one having developed a couple of them myself. Are you interested in tag teaming?

While I don't know what tag teaming is, I would need to develop an API first and foremost to let you actually do that. I'm planning to create an API in the coming weeks.

Re: Show HN: Monica, an open-source CRM to manage friends and family

#339

Post by anigbrowl »

robinhood wrote: post #239
anigbrowl wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The product is super cool and useful, although I hope you won't limit it to being a single-user thing because it could actually evolve into an amazing social tool. But I would really lose the word 'manage', it kind of suggests that personal relations are just another kind of task which is apt to make the people being related to feel devalued because they're not important enough to be given space in someone's day-to-d…

You know what I meant. I didn't imply poetry meant nothing. Of course not. But I see SAAS more and more describing their product in ways that are too marketing to me. I prefer to go straight to the point. Regarding the gender, I don't know what to think about this. It's not by any mean a way to degrade women. I will definitely consider choosing another name because I understand how some people could be offended by th…

Of course I know what you meant, but I'm trying to give you some free branding advice that would substantially increase the likely uptake for your tool.I am not a marketing oriented person either, but successful businesses often spend about the same money/effort on marketing as they do on product development. That's certainly the magic formula in the film industry - 50% on the production and 50% on the ad campaign.
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