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Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

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Re: Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

#111

Post by sails »

wil5for wrote: post #102

I recently developed my own app to solve the same problem, I call the Personal CRM a “PRM” (link here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/prim-relationship-manager/id14... ) The privacy comments elsewhere in the thread resonated with me, but I think self hosting is too large a barrier for most users. I decided to build Prim by leveraging iCloud’s local/cloud CoreData storage. This approach ensures I never have access to u…

What are your thoughts on data interoperability? I have a few contact lists (names, emails, numbers, addresses across a few services) that I'd like to consolidate into a single list and take that into whatever app I end up using. Is this at all possible? Have you come across any useful standards?

Re: Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

#112

Post by Throwaway1771 »

angry_octet wrote: post #80
neolog wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've been downvoted, but it does seem like a high risk for information security.

Everyone loves to preach ethics and accountability but I think lots of people in tech secretly dislike the constraints. Or not so secretly if they work at fb. For everything you do, you should consider "what if this is used by the worst person to target the most vulnerable people?" Stalker exes, online scammers, insurance companies, 4chan wieners, toxic MRAs, data brokers working for PIs etc. Assume an open S3 bucket…

Wait until you hear what people are storing on PasteBin!

Re: Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

#113

Post by throwaway_pdp09 »

brtkdotse wrote: post #91
tomgs wrote: post #79

I have to mention that this is one of the top 3 tools in my personal stack. See some comments below regarding various things I saw in this thread. Stability: Been running it for 2+ years now (or is it 3+ already?), no problems whatsoever. I update when the mood strikes - never had to roll back because something wasn't working. Why: As someone who considers himself terrible at remembering things, this little piece of…

> There's a (repeating) notion in this thread that keeping up with people is somehow linked to how much you care about them. I care deeply about many people I meet, personally, but I don't think the two are necessarily correlated. I wholeheartedly agree. There’s a similar resistance towards books like “How to win friends...”, like you’re a sleazy car salesman for trying to improve your social skills. It’s like harpin…

for some reason you omitted the sleazier half of the title "...and influence people".

Improving social skills and using them manipulatively are entirely different things. If you've ever known or worked with psychopaths you'll get that immediately. I suppose there's a continuum but still.

Re: Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

#116

Post by sam_goody »

vonseel wrote: post #64
hisnameisjimmy wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally get this thinking, but I am oriented totally differently from you. I will forget my friend's birthdays, their kids names, their wife's names, things they've talked about recently, etc, etc. I have a terrible memory for this stuff. I'm not sure if it's just me being stubborn, but all of these things just feel very slippery to my mind. On the other end, I will remember in vibrant detail very trivial facts tha…

You won't forget the names when it matters. If you can't remember these basic details, it's a sign that person is not close enough to you for it to actually matter. Or, maybe you're like me and you just met the person five minutes ago. Either case is forgivable.

If you can't see someone, you obviously don't care about them. (Glasses are a conspiracy?) And if you can't hear your friends, you must hate them.

I can never remember my age, and have missed my birthday on occasion. When under pressure, I forget which of my children is the older, and confuse their names.

In other news, I speak with a heavy accent, and am embarrassed by it all the time. I have tried learning to speak natively, without luck.

This, despite my having an above average IQ.

Everyone is somewhere on the bell curve in all of our capabilities. Cut some slack for others where they lack, and appreciate the talents you have.

Re: Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

#117

Post by submeta »

This looks like a beautiful software. But I would like to add some thoughts.

In the past I've been using many tools for managing all kinds of data. In the 90s MS Access for creating personal database "apps". In the 2000s various CRM solutions (desktop-based, self-hosted and hosted; among others Act CRM, SugarCRM, Highrise). Also, extensively used a self-hosted version of Confluence as a personal wiki (yeah, way to heavy for the goal). And then also many many PIM tools for managing personal notes, contact data and notes.

I have seen many tools come and go. Many of them have high maintenance costs in the long run, especially if you decide to use a self-hosted version. But even if you decide to pay for the hosted version: Your data is stuck in someone elses solution.

Finally, I come to realize, that no matter how shiny and beautiful an interface might seem, in the end the long-term accessibility and the ability to keep and own my data is much more important than anything else.

Now I keep most of my essential data in plain text-files, albeit in a structured way (in org-mode + Emacs). Emacs + Lisp are just wonderful: I can write some code in Emacs Lisp to create the perfect workflow, for all kinds of use-cases (meeting notes, contact data, overviews in ascii-tables, text-files dedicated for certain contacts, structured in org-mode and many more).

I tend to think that Emacs + Org + plain-text will be here in fifty years from now, when all other shiny solutions are replaced by the latest trends du-jour. Feels good to liberate my data.

Re: Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

#118

Post by angry_octet »

Throwaway1771 wrote: post #96
angry_octet wrote: post #25

Offering this as a hosted instance is tantamount to conspiracy to enable identity theft, and worse. These things just shouldn't be chucked into someone's S3 bucket or SQL database.

No, let's sync it to Facebook/WhatsApp/Snapchat/Google, so we know our privacy will be invaded.

A set of index cards works pretty well. An excel file on a USB stick is pretty good for most people. Even better if you can use an encrypted volume -- simple on macos and painful elsewhere.

The usual trade-off is ease of access -- on the cloud you can get it anywhere. But it isn't encrypted, it's accessed via an API, and you're dependent on someone not fucking that up.

This software can run offline, which is good, but the monetisation is via the cloud, which is bad.

Too bad portable software is such a shitshow. Everyone has these enormous runtime engines and there is no way to be confident in anything they run hasn't been updated the siphon off everything to a random cloud instance. It's architected to trust the cloud rather than devices we can physically control.

Re: Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

#119

Post by angry_octet »

Throwaway1771 wrote: post #112
angry_octet wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone loves to preach ethics and accountability but I think lots of people in tech secretly dislike the constraints. Or not so secretly if they work at fb. For everything you do, you should consider "what if this is used by the worst person to target the most vulnerable people?" Stalker exes, online scammers, insurance companies, 4chan wieners, toxic MRAs, data brokers working for PIs etc. Assume an open S3 bucket…

Wait until you hear what people are storing on PasteBin!

Security companies ('threat intel') routinely scan new pastes to find nice stuff, like creds and code, and also C&C from bots. Pastebin is a bit gauche for that now. Even S3 bucket scanning is too everyday.

Re: Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

#120

Post by halgir »

Like others in this thread, I tried using this some years ago. But unfortunately the friction of yet another specialized tool kept me from actively maintaining it, which of course makes it entirely worthless.

I've started just using Google Contacts for this. It syncs and integrates with all my devices, supports birthday reminders, relations and custom fields, and has a general purpose note taking area for gifts and other details.

I only wish the custom fields were more powerful/versatile and that the relations could be hyperlinked with other contacts instead of being just text fields.

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