Slashdot Mirror

I believe the service you are referring to is IM Smarter.

Hi, everyone! I'm David, the author of IM Smarter. I'm glad that people are interested enough in the service to post about it. I'm sorry that I wasn't able to post this earlier, as I was in a (very long) meeting with some folks from the Chicago Beck Foundation to discuss different ways to promote literacy in the third world.

Anyhow, I'm here now, and I'd like to respond to some of the higher-order points that people have made. I think that it's correct that trust is a big issue here. This is part of the reason why we tried to create a privacy policy that would clearly hold your private data as sacred to us. This is also why we took the unusual step of making a privacy promise. The comments in this forum make it clear that we didn't do a good enough job in making it clear that your private data is yours alone. We would be delighted to work, with your constructive feedback, on a privacy policy that does a better job making it clear that your chats are for your eyes only. I actually did ask the EFF to edit and review my privacy policy, but they haven't set up a program for doing that. If any of you know of a consumer-rights organization that would be interested in working with a company on drafting a consumer-focused privacy policy, please do let me know about them.

Let me be very clear here: we will not scrape the content of your IM chats to deliver advertising to you. This is not GMail. We will not sell or otherwise disclose your personally identifiable information to third parties. We are here to use your information for you, not against you. If that makes it harder for me to rake in the big bucks as quickly, so be it. I am here to protect your privacy and improve your IM. (The last time I was on Slashdot, it was because my non-profit had successfully sued Diebold in federal court for infringing free speech rights. We won - thank you EFF!)

There was some concern that our intended deployment of Premium features would suddenly disable currently-available features. This is not true. There are a suite of kickass *new* features planned for Premium - the services that are currently offered as Free will continue to be offered without cost throughout the service's lifetime.

If you have any other questions or concerns about the service, I'd be happy to hear about them. Having launched less than two weeks age we frankly weren't ready for Slashdot with regards to our privacy messaging or site design (which, yes, totally blows but should be fixed in the next week or two). We've got a lot of great features yet to deploy - as I said on the Engadget interview, logging is really only the tip of the iceberg. Logging isn't the *point*. The point is having an agent who can work on your behalf to keep you in the loop about things you want to know about and who can keep away messages you don't want brought to you (at the moment because you're busy, or ever).

This is my baby, the fruit of my labors of a year. I realize my baby's pretty ugly and infantile right now, but my metric for going out of private beta was to launch at the point when I could imagine that at least one random person out there on the Internet could plausibly find the service interesting enough to use on a regular basis. I think we're at that point now, albeit not at the point where we're the service "everyone obviously should use". The service continues to make progress on a regular basis. I can only hope and pray that people will be patient with me as it creaks onwards towards becoming a great, genuinely useful service for people.

Have a great Saturday night, everyone.

Peace,
David E. Weekly

Coceve has patents pending on its unique technology for providing a platform for delivering messages to a wide variety of IM services. Its trademark on "IM Smarter" is also pending registration at the USPTO.

From here:

What if I forgot my password for the website?
Easy! Just type FORGOT to the service, and it will send you a link that you can use to log in again and reset your password! Try to remember your new password. :)

How do I get the service to bug me less often?
No problem. Just type BUG ME LESS to the service and it will send you a link that you can use to log in again and reset your password! Try to remember your new password. :)


Looks like someone got a little lazy.

From the privacy policy

2.2 Signing Up for IM Smarter
Basic Subscription: When you register for IM Smarter, we ask for your name, IM clients used, ZIP code, and age. All of these are required in order for our service to function properly. Basic Subscriptions are paid for by targeted advertising. Thus, as a Basic subscriber, we may also ask you about your interests from time to time, to help our sponsors select advertisements most appropriate to your interests.

One thing I wish the interviewer had covered was the privacy aspect of the IMSmarter. What prevents others from accessing your chats and collections of notes through the service? How is it protected from malicious intruders? Why should I trust David to hold onto my stuff? All of which, of course, is not going to stop me from trying it out. If I have something important to say, I don't say it via instant message. It's just an aspect I'd like to see covered in the interview. It is covered in the sites privacy policy, but I'd like to hear a little more from the creator on that front.