There is something about great sales people or deal makers that is entirely social. They are connectors, as Malcolm Gladwell calls them—people who know the interests, skills, and needs of everyone in their social or business circle and connects them together. If you are really good at this, like Sidney Weinberg (a legend who helped build Goldman Sachs), you are a super-connector.
Zentact has the modest goal to help you become a super-connector. It has a long way to go before it can do that. But it is starting with the kernel of something that is intriguing. At its core, Zentact is a browser add-on (for Firefox only right now) that helps you read the Web with the interests of your social network in mind. If you want to try it out, we have 500 invites for the private beta (but once you are in, you can invite as many people as you want by sending them a message through Zentact).
Here is what is supposed to happen once you have Zentact all set up. Reading an article about black labs? A box pops up to remind you that your co-editor loves black labs and lets you email him the article with a note right from that page. Run across a blog post that mentions a contact’s company? Same thing happens. You can forward that article or link and make yourself look thoughtful in the same way that setting up automatic birthday reminders in your calendar or Amazon makes you look like you went the extra effort to remember someone’s birthday.
“This is basically a karma points system,” says investor and adviser Eric Marcoullier, the CEO of Gnip. Marcoullier and Zentact co-founders John Sampson and Jared Brandt are all MyBloglog refugees. They founded Zentact with a few hundred thousand dollars. (Howard Lindzon is their biggest angel investor).
Before you can start using Zentact, first it needs to ingest all of your contacts from Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo Mail. Then—and this is its weak point—you have to tag each contact with their interests, company affiliations, and whatnot. That right there almost makes it a non-starter for me. Some people, I realize, will do this obsessive tagging (sales people, recruiters, biz dev types), but not most people. I have 2,318 contacts in Gmail. There is no way I am going to go through and tag those. It would be much better if Zentact could simply get all of this information from one of my existing social networks like Facebook or LinkedIn, which already know all of my contacts’ interests and affiliations.
The software, however, does have a saving grace. Whenever you email someone in Gmail, a Zentact box opens up right in the email below the address field where you can add tags and other data in a piecemeal fashion. That makes the process a lot less daunting, and lets you focus on the people you actually are in contact with the most frequently.
Once that is set up, then the Zentact box is supposed to pop up whenever it reads a tag contextually on a page and tell you which contacts you might want to email the link with a thoughtful note. It acts a a surrogate super-connector brain in that way. Explains Marcoullier:
The vast majority of people get information, they process it for internal use, and then move on. Why not build a plugin that reads what you are reading and alerts you to the fact that it might be relevant to someone in your network?
That could be helpful or annoying depending on how often it pops up. You can moderate that based on the tags you use. The actual mechanics of Zentact are still a little bit buggy in my experience (although that could just be my dying computer or the fact that I imported way too many contacts). But this is a rough beta and there is a lot of promise here.
Once you’ve tagged a bunch of contacts, then you can click on each tag at Zentact’s Website and see all the contacts who share a certain interest. This could be great for organizing soccer games or biking trips or a startup, or that matter. It all depends on how good is your personal tag database. How well do you know your contacts and what they are good at?
Zentact will soon add the ability to actually connect like-minded contacts to each other, which is really what super-connectors do. When it does that and can automatically tag your contacts for you, then I’ll really be excited about it. But what I really want is for my existing social networks to do this for me.
Don’t know how well it’s going to be against linkedin. Going to try it out.
We agree it would be hard to go against LinkedIn. In fact, we love the service ( check out http://blog.lin...rom-startup-to/)
Our goal it to help you keep your network green, top of mind etc. When you give it a try, check out our LinkedIn integration.
I was thinking linkedin too. I don’t how popular this will be though if you have to enter all your contacts info.
I justed you the import functionality and it worked fine – 400 contacts and a match based on name the first day.
Wow..Sleeping with the enemy. Very nice and sneaky. Good luck.
LinkedIn has grown arrogantly too big. I see LinkedIn to be another Ebay. Too fat and backwards.
I have been using Zentact for only a day so far and have to admit it is fairly useful, but does need a little work. imho, this is a tool worth trying out; it may soon end up a keeper.
Thanks for the invite. I am so scatterbrained sometimes that this seems like it could be very helpful. Now, if it could just read my mind to make the appropriate connections…
Thanks for the review! When you import contacts, we automatically tag them with their names. We don’t recommend trying to do anything else – just add them as your email them.
I know, but what would be helpful is a list of suggested tags based on information from my address book or, better yet, my contacts linkedIn/Facebook profiles. I agree that auto-filling a bunch of tags is probably overkill, but auto-suggesting is different.
What about the APML standard from DataPortability.org?
http://www.apml.org/
There are some connecting bells ringing for me…
I like this service, think it has great promise for the niche, less for the mass market, but there’s gold in the right niche.
I suspect this service will offer a lot of value to self-defined ‘networkers’, but our research at Visible Path suggested that this is a small fraction (<2%) of the workforce using social networking tools. The required investment (tagging contacts) might prove too much for anyone but these networkers. Begs for a little email parsing to suggest tags – Google’s proven you can do it well via adwords in gmail.
In any event, as personalized news services, RSS feeds and search agents continue to improve and be more broadly adopted, I’m finding that that me and my colleagues have often (usually?) already items seen the items being forwarded. I suspect its going to be important for networkers to focus on defining more obscure tags and sending more obscure items that the recipient is unlikely to have seen.
Still, cool. Trying it as we speak.
Antony
Somehow I think that if I need a reminder to send a blogpost (article, whatever) to one of my contacts, because the blogpost (article, whatever) didn’t make me think about it, a part of the reason could be that in reality I’m not keen enough to send that email after all.
But I’d make a really-really bad super-connector, I assume.
//and also, there’s no way I’m gonna tag my thousand-something contacts. Not even the first 50.
Sounds intriguing. I’ve signed up and like the idea. The service seems a bit sparse but has potential.
It might be a good service to connect with our upcoming API at http://www.getdoorbell.com
Thank you for the write up Eric. Greatly appreciate your articulation of the product!
While tagging all your contacts is not immediately required, when you do, as Antony suggests, “obscure tags” will likely work best. What you know intimately about another individual, i find, is key. We hope to make the process of tagging your contacts as seamless as possible, as we’ve done with the Gmail integration.
Thanks to all that try Zentact, we’re anxiously awaiting your feedback!
Sorry “Erick” — my relationship w/ Marcoullier must have sparked that slip
Thanks again!
I’ve signed up as well. Looks a bit immature, but I can see the potential.
the tool that helps you browser better: http://www.cobr....com/Tags/web01
i just would never leave that content on their servers, it’s far more personal than name, email and phone
my real concern is that assigning such attributes is great, and old news to custom CRM type apps (going all the way back to act and goldmine in the mid 90’s, like adding “tennis” to the interests of a contact) – but how are we to get this information out of zentact if we want to leave? and even if it were easy to take the data out, where would it go? gmail doesn’t hold the variables, nor do most personal contact managers on most machines, and it would need to map to a fantasy field..
my contacts will be around for many, many years, but zentact may be gone within 2 or 3 or less when these guys find some other interesting idea, so again, where does the data go later on?
they’re creating a solution to a problem that does not exist. it’s super clever and a wonderful idea, but not practical – just ask the w3c how it’s going getting everybody in the world to help out with the semantic web – oh, and remember 99, when every industry had it’s own emerging xml format? still using HRXML to code human resources related attributes?
exactly.
I’m having a tough time finding any LinkedIn integration – the site makes reference to it, but I’m stumped.
Looks like an interesting site.
Hey Dave… I saw this link about the LinkedIn integration on the Zentact Blog:
http://blog.zen...ue-of-linkedin/
Zentact should be integrated into the LinkedIn navigation for your contacts after you install the Firefox add-on.
@Todd, many thanks!
I like this, and am always looking for better ways to keep my contacts fresh. In addition to the above, I’d love better tabindexing (e.g., I could tab from the address field into the zentact field). And down the road, a way for this to constantly be scanning my google reader.
Congrats to the team on moving idea to reality. Trust me everyone, the feature set you see now will be a fraction of the capabilities within 6-12 months. I’m not a company insider, I just know the individuals and how they work.
I’m surprised no one mentioned the funny little story behind this service, so I’ll just say Scott Rafer and leave it at that
Also is “refugees” really the right term to describe their MyBlogLog history. MyBlogLog was and still is a big success in start-up world. How about ‘alumni’ instead?
No, I think refugees is better
i like the idea… but why are you trying to become another social network? I’m looking at a blue “Connect” button to my right which can solve a lot of initial issues and help jumpstart your “network.”
I’m sure as connect develops we’ll have access to trends from the user. this should allow you to focus on your core competencies too rather than spend money on marketing.
good lucks guys
Ashot — the Zentact guys aren’t looking to become another social network. In fact, the goal is that after you sign up, you can get all the benefits without ever visiting the site again (shades of MyBlogLog for those who are familiar with the founding philosophy). Over time I think you’ll see more features that prove that idea out.
The challenge with all the “Connect”-style OpenID services right now is that they don’t allow for storage of data. They work great for identity management (I want to log into a Service B with my Service A credentials) but they don’t work at all services that need persistent use of a social graph, or your interests, or whatever. Hopefully, this will change with widespread adoption of OAuth, but we’ll see.
For now, expect to see several more integrations like what the guys have done with Gmail and Yahoo Mail: seamless integrations that enable you to tag your contacts when they are front and center rather than force you to come back to yet another place to manage your address book.
And along the way, maybe Gnip can help some of the issues required to push data back and forth between Zentact and its partners
looks interesting. btw – who is Howard Lindzom
http://howardlindzon.com/
One would think it’s better and more accurate to get someone to self tag.
Or go down the route of contextual tag extraction. Having to manually tag in this case would be painful.
Like the potential in this one, but might want to wait out the sign-up until some more early beta kinks are worked out. Having issues with email validation and Firefox plugin not working (see getsatisfaction for details).
Great innovation, I can’t wait to use this one.
http://www.youtechno.info
This could be very useful. In particular I would like to use it to connect with people doing social work for poor people. Im working on a series of projects to build hospitals and schools for the poorest of the poor.
So what is the “invite” code?
This should work for Twitter followers.
By monitoring my followers and reporting what sites they are tweeting I could get an idea of what my followers and their followers are interested in, then tweet about it. It would make me more useful to them.
Have signed up & was great to read in Welcome email “It’s important to note that tagging all your contacts right now is not necessary. We’ll provide integrated methods that will make it easy to tag those in your network over time. Plus, we’ll automatically search for names upon import, adding value immediately.”
Phew .. look forward to using you to connect.
I will definitely try this. I am always looking for ways to optimize my contact lists. And I trust that these guys will find ways to eliminate the limitations in the very near future.
IMHO, the execution is not quite as straightforward…. don’t know what everyone else thinks.
Also, their firefox extension created havoc on my computer… had to disable it
Just getting started with the service…
For what I’ve been reading in the comments section, one of the main complains is the fact that TAGS have to be entered manually for each contact.
What if:
1. there was an option to select multiple contacts and assign some “basic” tags to them all at once? that would cut a bit of work, even though you would want to go back in at a later time and edit/add more specific tags
2. The system sends an invitation/contact email to “selected” contacts so they can go into your account list and edit their own tags?
D.
I’m doing exactly this my clients and contacts now (all be it manually). I outline it in an article I wrote for Small Business Branding Blog: http://www.smal...#comment-247774
I’ll be keeping an eye on this service. It was brought to my attention by one of my readers.