Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Inkling launches tgethr.com

We just launched a new product today:

tgethr

It has little to do with our "day job" of running a prediction market platform for companies, but it was something we built for ourselves to use internally and decided it was useful enough we should turn it in to a product.

Basically it's the "ANTI-sharepoint/googlewave/socialnetwork/lotsofoverheadcollaborationtool" - it's just an extremely simple way to collaborate with a project team, friends, family, club, or sports team via email.

Setup a group name, i.e. "[email protected]" with whomever you want to participate, and write to it. We keep a private-only archive of everything you write on the web. You can cc: or bcc: to it, tag your correspondence, search for stuff, and it's secure with both ssl and email encryption.

The original reason we built tgethr was for security reasons. We use a secure chat room every day to work together on minutiae and other hosted tools for customer support tickets, bug tracking, code repositories, etc. but most of those apps send an email when they're updated - convenient, but also insecure.

We also wanted something that was simple. We communicate constantly within Inkling, but also have groups of friends and family we want to easily stay in touch with as well. We found our options to be a google group, basecamp, or using a white label social network. Nice tools, all, but also a lot of overhead for simple correspondence. And let's face it, the vast majority of us are still creatures of email. These apps feel clunky when all we want to do is securely send quick messages back and forth either in front of our laptop or on our iPhones.

So we decided much maligned email is still the easiest way for us to communicate. Why not try and play to its strengths vs. fighting it and forcing a browser experience down our throats?

Inkling Markets is still our love and first born, but hopefully people find Tgethr as useful as we have so far and find ways to put it to good use.

Just like in Inkling you can "try before you buy" and set up a free group.

We're anxious to hear what everyone thinks so don't hesitate to contact us if you try it out.

2 comments:

Christopher Ashworth said...

Hi Adam,

Congrats on your launch! This looks brilliant. I am extremely jealous I didn't think of it. :)

One question that's come up as I and some friends have been testing it out: what exactly does the message limit mean? That's the one thing at the moment that has me raising an eyebrow in concern. We can get pretty fast and furious with email, and if # of messages = number of emails, the limits currently on the plans are gonna hurt.

Best,
Chris

Unknown said...

Chris,

Thanks for checking out tgethr. "Message" means 1 email to the group. So for example if you have 5 people in your group, and you send a note to [email protected], that counts as 1 message even though we're internally processing 5 emails.

We're obviously in the beginning stages of this, so see how it goes and keep us posted on how you're doing on the message limits (you can see how many you've used on your settings page.) We'll ping other new users too about this in the coming days.