I've been a Greplin user for a while. I think I first signed up back in early 2011, when they had Facebook and Twitter support. Its pitch is a simple one. Greplin is an aggregated social and personal data in the cloud search engine. It lets user connect his Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and many other webmail services, and allow user to search on all data including contacts.
I have been a fan of their clean UI and responsive user experience from the start. Everything worked as expected. When indexing the newly connected account, it displayed the status of how fast the system is indexing the new feed. Search worked flawlessly with intuitive search results display and hyperlinks to drill down to the returned result.
However I felt there was something missing. Greplin has executed very refined user experience on a problem that everyone could relate to. Yet I did not find myself going back to Greplin for my own use of searching my feeds. I was going back to Greplin to illustrate how to get user experience right. Why?
The reason was simple. Social feed search was not a problem for me.
Knowing that I could search for posts even after several days later was interesting. But it was not much more than that. When I wanted to pull out earlier post, I knew which social network or webmail account I should search. Most of business stuff goes to LinkedIn, blog posts to Twitter, and rest of personal updates to Facebook. I also segment webmails similarly so that I get all my personal stuff to one webmail account. So when I want to search something, I already know where to look.
What would be the point of going to Greplin if I already knew which social network or webmail to search on? Not much.
Yesterday I read that Greplin is relaunching as Cue. Cue is a service that "helps you stay one step ahead by turning your email, contacts, and calendar into an intelligent snapshot of your day" according to its new About page.
Building on its existing Greplin technology, Cue is looking to anticipate the tasks that you are likely to do and make them easy for you to do. Basically Cue is trying to become virtual personal assistance that knows your schedule and what you might need to do next.
There is a problem that many of us have. Not being able to keep up with things that are on our schedule and things that we meant to get through, but was not able to. All of us have felt that there aren't enough hours in the day to go through all action items.
I think Greplin pivot to Cue is an interesting case study. Certainly they have the right first step in tackling a big problem that everyone has. Now the next challenge is good execution and user adoption. Judging from Greplin experience, I am anticipating knock-out performance from the two co-founders, Daniel Gross and Robby Walker.
| Bye bye Greplin; hello Cue! |
However I felt there was something missing. Greplin has executed very refined user experience on a problem that everyone could relate to. Yet I did not find myself going back to Greplin for my own use of searching my feeds. I was going back to Greplin to illustrate how to get user experience right. Why?
The reason was simple. Social feed search was not a problem for me.
Knowing that I could search for posts even after several days later was interesting. But it was not much more than that. When I wanted to pull out earlier post, I knew which social network or webmail account I should search. Most of business stuff goes to LinkedIn, blog posts to Twitter, and rest of personal updates to Facebook. I also segment webmails similarly so that I get all my personal stuff to one webmail account. So when I want to search something, I already know where to look.
What would be the point of going to Greplin if I already knew which social network or webmail to search on? Not much.
Yesterday I read that Greplin is relaunching as Cue. Cue is a service that "helps you stay one step ahead by turning your email, contacts, and calendar into an intelligent snapshot of your day" according to its new About page.
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| Good luck to Daniel Gross and Robby Walker on pivoting to Cue. |
There is a problem that many of us have. Not being able to keep up with things that are on our schedule and things that we meant to get through, but was not able to. All of us have felt that there aren't enough hours in the day to go through all action items.
I think Greplin pivot to Cue is an interesting case study. Certainly they have the right first step in tackling a big problem that everyone has. Now the next challenge is good execution and user adoption. Judging from Greplin experience, I am anticipating knock-out performance from the two co-founders, Daniel Gross and Robby Walker.
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