Get tgethr
We’re proud to announce the launch of a tool we’ve been using pretty heavily internally. It’s called tgethr.
Tgethr is extremely simple in concept:
- Provides a single email address for your group: groupname@tgethr.com. Anyone in the group can email that address and the whole group gets a copy and can reply from their email clients or on the web. (Admit it, often we are too lazy to type in the 5 or so email addresses of our immediate family to share even mundane news they would actually love to hear about. I know I am.)
- Super simple for group members. They don’t have to worry about yet another account on yet another web application. People can continue to use their email clients without ever signing up online.
- A web interface + archive of the discussion (without all the repetition). Everyone gets SSL.
- Email encryption! The group’s messages can be encrypted both ways, and we centrally store the group members public certificates to make the email encryption setup much easier for the group.
- Links to centrally stored files so the same file attachment isn’t sitting in umpteen inboxes.
- iPhone interface. iPhone doesn’t support encrypted email but we made it easy to get both encrypted and unencrypted mail from your phone.
- Super simple CRM. BCC or forward messages to/from non-group members (vendors, clients, etc.) and have those discussions shared and searchable by the rest of your group.
Who is it for?
Well it was for us. And we think we aren’t that much different than a lot of other folks so maybe it’s for you too. So who are we?
- Developers and designers. We write a lot of code and design a lot of web stuff. We use tgethr to share that stuff with each other.
- Business owners. As a small business we need share the discussions we have over feedback, bugs, sales calls/emails, etc.
- We have families and friends we’d like to hear much more about than in brief and public headlines, tweets, and Facebook statuses.
- Condo owners. Some of us live in Condo associations. Simple way to email everyone in the building and share common invoices and news. Our cable bills going up :(
- People who do stuff with other people (clubs, events, societies). We don’t alway want to do stuff alone. This week is the Chicago Cares Servathon. Tgethr makes it easy to organize a quick group of people who are part of our volunteer team.
A few ways we use it:
- We love Hoptoad for staying on top of our applications error messages. We use tgethr to have private discussions easily about those error messages. Just forward the message and our comments into tgethr and whalla: instant private collaboration over bug fixes.
- We also love our customer support tool, Tender. Tender makes it easy to communicate with our customers and users about their questions and issues, but we compliment it with tgethr. If we need to discuss a question on our support site, again, we just forward the email into tgethr with our comments.
- With our families. We can’t believe the communication we now have with our very close family and friends. People who only see and talk to each other about once every 2 years are now emailing each other because it’s so easy.
- We add hashtags to certain notes we send to tgethr, like #ideas or #todo
Why we built it:
We wanted a little better way to collaborate over email - but to do it securely. We like email and already do a ton of collaboration over it. If you hate email, you probably will hate tgethr. But who knows :)
We wanted to easily manage groups of people’s emails addresses (our colleagues at work, and our family+friends) and to be able to communicate without our messages ending up on someone’s Facebook wall or Twitter stream.
We use Facebook and we use Twitter, but for the purpose of communicating privately and securely with the people close to us, they don’t cut it.
We didn’t want the heft of so many of the collaboration tools that exist today. Some of these tools are great (Basecamp/Backpack/Highrise come to mind), but still have so much more than we need in terms of features. And those guys would be the first to agree, it’s built for the people it’s built for, and people with other needs should look elsewhere.
We need more than a discussion over “headlines” (e.g. 140 character messages). We like being able to write a multi paragraph message, and edit the thing. We even edit our instant messages before we send them.
We wanted super simple CRM. We can forward or copy emails to that somename@tgethr.com and have the original sender or recipient saved alongside the message so we can find all previous discussions with certain people easily by clicking on someone’s email address from the web interface.
We wanted to communicate with our colleagues, friends and family without constantly repeating our selves or fishing through address books to find a dozen email addresses.
And the the most important thing we wanted was security.
Any software as a service app today worth it’s salt, offers at least a version of it’s service with SSL encryption. Which is great. But where these apps stop is email security.
So if we are so worried about having our conversations protected over SSL in these collaboration SaaS tools, why don’t we think twice about having that same duplicate conversation (message, bug, ticket, issue, etc.) repeated over an email alert that comes to us completely unencrypted?
It’s because email encryption is a bit tougher than SSL. SSL is automatic. Email encryption requires setup.
If you wanted to encrypt emails to a group. First you need a “certificate”. But then you need to exchange your certificate with everyone else in your group. And if someone joins your group down the line, now you have to repeat a bunch of that exchange.
So with tgethr, we’ve boiled down email encryption into a series of steps that we think you can get through in a few minutes. We also make setting up new users in a group trivial for the group owner and rest of the group. We save these public email certificates at our central spot in this group “hub”. We do the worrying about whose certificate we have and don’t have. And if we don’t have one, we help people go through those steps and we still send them messages that allow them to get to their discussions online over SSL in the meantime.
Email encryption is a great tool. Unfortunately iPhone doesn’t support it yet. So we’ve also built an iPhone interface to tgethr, so you can still click on a link in any tgethr email alerts on your iPhone, and use our iPhone web interface over SSL to see the encrypted content of your discussions and make protected replies.
And the bottom line, we only want to offer simple and secure messaging. We don’t want to offer you the kitchen sink of other collaboration tools that’s going to replace other awesome tools your using. There’s some great Todo lists out there (Basecamp, Remember the Milk, TaskPaper come to mind). And meeting scheduling, and enormous file sharing, etc.
We want to be invisible. We don’t care if you use the web interface. Easily sending encrypted email with your mail client to your group might be good enough for you. We don’t need your eyeballs or click throughs or whatever marketing thing the Facebooks and Google Groups and Twitters are going to need.
It’s the anti-Google Wave. It’s the anti-Twitter. It’s the anti-Facebook. In a way it’s even the anti-Basecamp/Backpack/Highrise. :)
Tgethr attempts to make emailing a group of people a little bit better. We don’t want to replace email or provide a new revolution in collaboration with fancy tools. (You aren’t going to play chess in real time over tgethr).
Email is still the most prominent form of communication we have. Do you really need that fancy collaboration tool or do you just need to get tgethr?
