Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Mingly Makes Gmail Social With $500K From Idealab

Are you one of those people who never forgets a birthday, regularly stays in touch with people and remembers to send out congratulatory gifts when friends go through life changes? Me neither.

Maybe relationship management tool Mingly, which today launches as a plug-in for Gmail in Firefox and Chrome, can help.

As an alternative to viewing your inbox by order of most recent message, Mingly shows a feed of contacts and important events drawn from their social streams, like birthdays, relocations and job changes. Then Mingly users can send private and public messages from within the app onto Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or email, whatever they prefer.

The company has raised $500,000 from Idealab, Allen Morgan, Alex Karelin and others. Now based in San Francisco after completing the LUXr lean user experience program, Mingly CEO Tyler Koblasa says Web and mobile apps are on the way, as well as automatic grouping of contacts.

Mingly is one of many social utility apps such as Xobni/Smartr and Rapportive, all of which are useful and awkward in their own ways. In trying many of them, I’ve found they could stand to integrate a lot more cleanly into the existing user experience of Gmail (or whatever they’re modifying).

Social addressbooks seem like they would be most effective as a mobile app or part of the mobile OS — but app developers have less flexibility there, especially in the controlled environment of iOS.

Latest Video

View all videos »

Search »

First the NSA came for, well, jeez pretty much everybody’s data at this point, and I said nothing because wait how does this joke work

— Parker Higgins via Twitter