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Magic – Completes signup forms automatically, with just an email address

magicsignup.com

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Re: Magic – Completes signup forms automatically, with just an email address

#11
post #5

Presumably, they have some preexisting database that maps email addresses to personal information. Their Privacy page, however, is not transparent how exactly they got this data: > Broadly speaking, we collect information in three ways: (1) when you provide it directly to us, (2) when we obtain information about you or your company through trusted third parties or indexing systems, and (3) passively through technolog…

It's Clearbit - and btw way more data than this is available on you based on an email address. Scary in a lot of ways for sure.

How is it that clearbit charges $99/2500 reqs, while magic is charging 1/5th of that?

Re: Magic – Completes signup forms automatically, with just an email address

#12
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's Clearbit - and btw way more data than this is available on you based on an email address. Scary in a lot of ways for sure.

How is it that clearbit charges $99/2500 reqs, while magic is charging 1/5th of that?

Probably a caching layer on their side.

Re: Magic – Completes signup forms automatically, with just an email address

#13
On the plus side

- The convenience factor is compelling, like auto-complete.

- As a v1 you can see the true magic in a seamless signup.

On the downside:

- It does something unusual / unexpected / creepy.

- It's too slow - noticeable lag vs. say the auto-suggest in search.

- If accuracy is good why bother exposing that to the user? Intercom.io does this all in the backend off of email only registrations and seems to have about a 70% hit rate. The data is useful to business owner but I'd bet the user would feel less enthusiastic knowing that I have their personal fb, twitter, linkedin, etc as soon as they register.

I am sure that svbtle can show the A/B data validating this is worthwhile for THEIR audience.

But I'm not sure for a broader use case this is going to help due to the factors mentioned above.

Re: Magic – Completes signup forms automatically, with just an email address

#14

um chrome (and presumably other browsers) already remember all of my information and autofill it...

Except it works terribly.

I hate how I only get those prompts when the field matches whatever fields Chrome thinks it should, yet many companies don't use these field ID's, so Chrome sits there stupidly.

I would love the ability to teach Chrome that this is a form and yes these are valid fields. Maybe somehow submit it to Google and have them update whatever regex they use. I feel like it fails about 50% of the time.

Re: Magic – Completes signup forms automatically, with just an email address

#15

I wonder if a new way to do signups would be just an emailto: link that you click and send. From there it automatically logs you in and sends you a password.

This is what I was thinking as well, but not necessarily email you a password because it's always some random crazy thing. More so remember the computer you clicked the email link from and either keep you logged in or you can log in with just your email from the computer you clicked the email link from. Sure there could be some security risks with your phone being stolen or a snooping SO, but most sites don't necessarily need to have that worry. For instance, commenting platforms like disqus, reddit, or your favorite news platform, or some site you'll probably only use once. With sites like this it doesn't matter much of other people gain access to it. It's not like your social platforms, LinkedIn, bank portal, government site, etc..

Re: Magic – Completes signup forms automatically, with just an email address

#20

It's pretty creepy that I can randomly enter email adresses and get first and last names... !

Tried some short gmail handles, can confirm. Creepy and stupid. Cloud-based datastores coming with your browser (aka what Chrome has* and probably its competitors too) have better performance, privacy, and UX; I can't think of any reason why I'd use something like this.

* - AFAIU if you set a sync passphrase you also get some (probably limited) form of "zero knowledge" client-side encryption; this makes me hopeful they implemented it properly i.e. "we literally can't access your shit" https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/1181035?hl=en

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