Betty's Blog

Cc:Betty to become Threadbox

Michael Cerda — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 23:02:32 +0000

We have an important announcement for you today…

Cc:Betty has been a textbook case study in bringing a minimum product to market, leaving the door open for many use cases and for a wide range of audiences, listening carefully and iterating the product based on your feedback and guidance. We’ve taken a chance on betting that email, while ubiquitous, will never be a good enough tool to harness discussions and files with groups of people. Honoring that ubiquity, we set out to give you the simplicity of email with the power of a web-based communication product.

This beta cycle has gone on for 10 months now, and we’ve found the most common use cases to be among folks in the workplace, in groups of 10 or fewer, in departmental workgroups and cross functional teams, as well as independent service professionals interacting with clients. We’ve found our email integration/interaction to be very popular, given most of us manage our workflow from email. We’ve found some of our web interface experience to be clunky and some of it to be intuitive along the way. We’ve found our branding/packaging to work well for the casual, more personal use cases. But for the majority, the workplace oriented user, the branding/packaging while cute, needed to be reeled in a bit. And we love naming and branding, so we came up with Threadbox.

To this end, Cc:Betty is becoming Threadbox. No, it’s not a new company, but it’s a new and improved product, packaged with functionality YOU have asked for. Threadbox will be coming this Spring, however we’re targeting an early preview for our active members later this month. CcBetty.com will continue to operate, so keep using it! At some point we’ll likely provide a migration path from ccbetty.com to threadbox.com for those that wish to move their data. We’ll also provide a data export function for those that wish to save their data.

And here’s a fun commercial, in honor of Basecamp’s 6th birthday:

Cc:Betty Use Cases

Michael Cerda — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 16:48:40 +0000

Cc:Betty has been in “beta” for about 9 months now. Over the months we’ve learned a lot about who you are and why you’re using the product. We’ve learned that about 70% of you are using the product in the workplace – either with small workgroups of 10 or less or in a service provider-client relationship. The small workgroups are functional organizations such as sales, marketing or product teams, as well as small or virtual businesses collaborating on projects. The service provider-client relationships are designers or developers managing project work specifications and deliverables, realtors managing client communications, lawyers keeping files and clients organized, event coordinators planning with stakeholders, and team leads across a variety of companies managing day to day workflow. In any case, all cases are people simply getting more done, and as we like to say keeping everyone on the same page, literally.

All of our findings have been accounted for in the design of our forthcoming Threadbox product. Sign up for the beta today, and we’ll be sure to provide Cc:Betty account holders an early exclusive preview.

small workgroup collaboration?

Michael Cerda — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 22:11:21 +0000

So, so many of you have been asking for business centric features, that we’ve gone ahead and begun to build an earnest business offering. That offering is still a bit under wraps as we pull it all together, but you can sign up to try the private alpha version (that means it’s breakable but useful nonetheless) at http://www.threadbox.com.

Happy holidays!

Betty Tip: Merge Discussions

Michael Cerda — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:29:35 +0000

Ever find that you’re in multiple discussions that are related? Well now you can merge them! Yes, you heard it right. Just go into the Discussion and click on OPTIONS and at the bottom of OPTIONS you’ll see MERGE. Go for it.

Share to Facebook!

ccbetty — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 05:15:58 +0000

Lots of y’all asked for this one. It’s true, it’s here, it’s SHARE TO FACEBOOK.

Until now, you could only share discussions by email, which works great when it’s a smaller group discussion. But when it’s a larger, perhaps less private discussion, you can now share discussions to your Facebook.

Get trusted opinions, recommendations, feedback or just plain have a little fun organizing group discussions. Your discussion snapshot will show up in your Facebook friend’s feeds, where they can quickly chime into your discussion. Rather than having the discussion scattered all over everyone’s newsfeeds, I’ll collate the entire discussion in your Cc:Betty discussion page.

Pick a face, any face

ccbetty — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 05:05:49 +0000

Lots of my friends agreed to let us use their glorious headshots as avatars. Personalize your Cc:Betty account today.

Who’s lurking in my discussion?

ccbetty — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 04:58:05 +0000

It happens to the best of us… we email a group of people. There’s always that one guy who doesn’t respond; and you never even know if he’s read it and then decided not to respond, or whether he just couldn’t care less. Well…. now you can see who’s viewed your discussion, who hasn’t, and even send send a reminder to the guy if you want to.

Delete Stuff

Michael Cerda — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 08:14:39 +0000

You ever write something or upload something and go “Oh for Pete’s sake, that’s not what I meant to do!” Well now, in the land of Betty, you can delete a message or a file you’ve added to a discussion. You’ll notice a small trash can near the item in question – just click it and it’s gone. Discussion initiators can delete anything and Discussion participants can only delete things they’ve contributed.

Betty Tip: Delete a User

Michael Cerda — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 05:49:44 +0000

Have you ever emailed a group of people, and there’s that one person that you later realize, you shouldn’t have added to the list? Not only has it become obvious you shouldn’t have added the person, but they would rather not have the extra email noise either…

Whenever you have a discussion going with a group of people in Cc:Betty, and you realize you want to delete someone from the discussion, you can.. Go to OPTIONS for that discussion, and select the user to delete, and be done.

Only the discussion initiator can delete someone in a discussion.

Welcome, Google Wave. Seriously.

Michael Cerda — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 15:55:46 +0000

Google Wave is the rage of the week. They announced 100,000 invites would be going out tomorrow. Well balls! If you don’t get in you can always come over here. Have a look at the ad running in today’s NYT (jk).

Remember Apple to IBM in the 80s?