Three days in, Brewster, the new personalized address book, has become an instant classic for me. Perhaps I lucked out, but I didn’t experience much of the delay in processing my contacts that many others reported – I had to wait about 90 minutes which, while not ideal, was fine. Everything since then seems to have been working like a charm – the de-duplication and reconciliation of contacts across social networks, in particular, was beautifully done, and that’s not a trivial data problem.
I have always liked the concept of a personalized, always current address book. In a way, it is sort of like the old Plaxo idea, which was probably before its time. There were various startups that tried to fix the address book, including Sensobi (that eventually was acquired by GroupMe). The next iteration of the social concept that I’m aware of is Everyme – at least in the initial vision the founders had for it when they were at Y Combinator in the Summer of 2011. I was a bit bummed when it pivoted (or evolved) to become a private social network.
I really like that Brewster came out of the gate very “feature-rich”. While I’m all for MVPs and generally agree that “if you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late”, for something like this, I think the founder(s) made the right call to wait until the product was ready before launching. At this stage of the game, anything that sounds like yet another hyped up app, and asks me to connect all my social networks when I first log in, etc. had better deliver some real value quickly for me to give it a real chance, and that was the case here. As the founder Steve Greenwood has apparently been mulling over this concept for many years, the temptation to release early must have been strong, particularly as it sounds like several startups are working on related concepts, including for example FullContact, but from my user’s standpoint, it was well worth it.
A few other aspects of the product (and its launch) that I like:
– I like that Brewster was clearly thought through as a data product – while the “Favorites” tab has an emotional and aesthetically pleasing aspect to it (depending on how attractive one’s friends are, at least…), the rest of the app is very data-centric: the “Lists” tabs has some interesting automatic categorization (I have 171 friends who are ‘Managing Director”, apparently, does that mean I’m old?), while the “Search” tab is awesome, with good suggested searches and the ability to uncover all sorts of interesting common interests across my contact list.
– While everything is automated, I like the fact that the product made me work manually to create my list of “favorites”. That actually increased my personal investment into the product, and makes me less likely to discard it.
– I really like that Brewster did not use any of the tired “virality” tricks that have become so common place. No automatic posting on my Facebook newsfeed; no “Sent using my Brewster address book” tag line in emails, etc.
– I was impressed with the email I got to announce that my account was ready, personalized with pictures of some of my key contacts – great way of delivering a unique experience before I even started using the product in earnest.
The data privacy issue (and the fairly dramatic reactions to it) are of course a concern. I’m actually surprised that I don’t care more about it, personally — I guess I have gone pretty far down the path of accepting some privacy risk (as long as it’s not banking information), in return for getting a lot of value from the product, which I feel is the case here. But obviously many people will feel differently, and this could sink the company entirely, if not properly addressed.
One functionality that I don’t find as impressive, at least as of now, is the “Updates” section — what it has surfaced so far (birthdays essentially) is not particularly interesting. What would be really cool, eventually, would be an integration with Newsle, to get news about your friends. Oh wait, add to this an integration with Cue, as well. All built in natively into my iPhone address book and calendar. Ok, so, maybe that’s a bit much to ask. In the meantime, Brewster is already one of the most interesting apps I have seen in a long time.