Taskforce (YC W11) Helps You Organize Your Inbox and Become a Taskmaster

http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/16/taskforce-helps-you-organize-your-inbox-and-become-a-taskmaster/

by niccolop • 15 years ago

110 51 15 years ago

twakefield• 15 years ago

Congrats guys. I've been using Taskforce for about a month now and really liking it. The fact that it's right in gmail makes it really handy.

zck• 15 years ago

Their example of "Convert emails into tasks and clear your inbox" is amusing (http://www.taskforceapp.com/?v=original_ft):

>from President Obama to me:

>How are you? Was wondering if you could give me a quick intro to Julian Assange. Or even just his current address would be nice.

dools• 15 years ago

/me adds a task in his existing task management system to try Taskforce once the "HN effect" dies down (500 internal server errors abound).

niccolop7• 15 years ago

Fixing it right now...

alexophile• 15 years ago

Looks excellent. One thing that would be way cool is Basecamp integration, like syncing milestones/to-dos to your inbox.

niccolop7• 15 years ago

consider it in the pipeline :-)

staunch2• 15 years ago

Is any of my data sent to Taskforce servers or leaked in any way?

csallen5• 15 years ago

Your tasks are sent over HTTPS and stored in our database. We don't need or request access to your emails, however.

ericflo• 15 years ago

Taskforce is really nice, I've been using it, and it definitely makes my life better.

biot• 15 years ago

What's the revenue model? Ad supported, premium features later on, or something else?

niccolop7• 15 years ago

certain premium features, which are already in the pipeline.

btucker• 15 years ago

Seems they may be having some issues at the moment. Getting a lot of nginx 500 errors & can't get anything to show up in gmail after installing the extension. I'll try again later.

d4nt2• 15 years ago

This looks like a great idea, but wake me when there's an Outlook extension. Most people who would want to use this are using Outlook (or possibly Lotus Notes).

peregrine• 15 years ago

Outlook has this feature...

d4nt2• 15 years ago

True, but I'm not using it because it's not very slick. I also think the viral nature of this extension could be huge.

Encosia• 15 years ago

I'd probably pay to use this if it had Outlook integration.

babyshake• 15 years ago

Met Niccolo and Courtland at the Heyzap office around the time of startup school and I've been hooked since.

Congrats on the launch!

davidmathers• 15 years ago

Sounds vaguely similar to http://www.activeinboxhq.com/

nhangen2• 15 years ago

Forgive my ignorance, and no offense intended, but how is an email extension considered a startup, and furthermore: a YC startup?

I realize that it's useful, and a great product, and I'm not implying otherwise, but this model seems to stretch the startup concept very thin.

zavulon• 15 years ago

http://www.xobni.com

staunch2• 15 years ago

Don't judge an iceberg by its tip.

patio11• 15 years ago

Somebody put this on a T-shirt, please. I will buy Several copies. (Relatedly, product is almost always the tip. If you think Zygna is defined by Farmville or Google is defined by that one big web page they have, you're crazy.)

csallen5• 15 years ago

And no offense taken :) I think it's important to keep in mind that startups grow and mature. Right now we're two people (only one programmer) who've been working for a few months. We've learned a lot and (in)validated more than a few crucial hypotheses, but things are far from over and our aspirations are huge.

As PG once said to us, "Microsoft started with a BASIC interpreter for the Altair."

orky56• 15 years ago

I think we should credit the two of you for convincing PG. After all, having a solid group of people is more useful than having a solid product. This is a great start and with you two at the helm, we can expect a lot more. Looking forward to it!

tzury• 15 years ago

I wondered the same, yet you have xobni, rapportive and this fresh new task-force.

Perhaps this is just the beginning, helping you getting things done, by first organizing your mail, transforming them into traceable tasks, and next would be a full blown task-force solution

kno• 15 years ago

The Link on Techcrunch appear to be broken, I'm getting a 500 error.

imajes• 15 years ago

i'm still really keen to try this, but taskforce doesn't yet support mailplane. Looking forward to getting that email when it does! :)

niccolop7• 15 years ago

we've actually been talking to mailplane, so it should be sooner rather than later.

tony_landis• 15 years ago

A nice concept, and the collaboration aspect is great. But this won't get me away from the task management desktop apps I am used to.

The plugin has no concept of projects as far as I can tell, which could be by simply tagging in gmail. As it is, I can simply drag the gmail url to my current desktop application icon which creates a task.

Perhaps for someone whose only work related tasks come in through gmail, this would be an improvement over just tagging an email.

Even if it were my case, I cannot see myself relying this app. I moved away from Things to The Hit List because it had VIM-like keyboard controls, and am used to being able to move around in gmail with the keyboard as well. As far as I can tell, there are no keyboard controls for this plugin.

CWIZO• 15 years ago

I guess I'm missing something, but nothing has changed in my gmail after installing the extension. I see no taskforce buttons. I even set my theme back to the default one hoping it would solve my "problem". Help?

cfontes• 15 years ago

Sorry but I already do this using Google Priority,Tags(TODO, TO READ) and Filters. works great ! But cheers for the effort of doing something more integrated and better looking, keep it going :D

Hum... installed but it doesn't work, did all things and still nothing.

krmmalik2• 15 years ago

Yet another miraculous tool to help you organise your cluttered inbox.

If you havent mastered the skill in organising your life so your inbox doesnt take over your life, no tool is going to make that any better for you.

Its a delusion.

csallen5• 15 years ago

If the point you just made was a person, I think I'd walk alongside him for 3/4 of a mile, and then stop right there. Do some people have trouble staying organized? Of course. Are they hopeless lost causes whom technology can't help? That's going too far.

The productivity field is an interesting area where, if you want to build something great, you need to do some real research on human behavior and psychology. If you had the world's most delicious ice cream, I doubt you'd try selling it in Siberia. Nor would you sell balloons at a funeral. Or cars without gas in the tank. So what's troubling is, plenty of people make seemingly-great productivity tools, and then promptly ignore obvious issues... like the fact that people tend to lose motivation over time. There's a reason we're building Taskforce in the inbox, and it's not because we're hopping on the "email overload" bandwagon.

We think that with enough intelligently-directed effort, we can create something that really does make people better at what they want to do.

krmmalik2• 15 years ago

Wait a minute. This is singularly the best piece of hostile customer persuasion i've seen in my WHOLE life.

I stand corrected and humbled. Even im going to sign up to this thing.

Where do i sign?

epi0Bauqu2• 15 years ago

So does this work with Google apps for domains? I can't easily figure out how to enable it.

niccolop7• 15 years ago

yes it does, you should be able to download it from our website.

epi0Bauqu2• 15 years ago

I did, but it says "Currently this single sign-in feature is disabled for the domain xxx Return to taskforceapp.com. For information on how a domain administrator can enable this feature, see these instructions."

I clicked on the link to return and it says can't login. And the directions don't make much sense.

Prospect2• 15 years ago

I am having the same issue. Please let us know if there is a way to get this working in google apps mail.

ninjastar99• 15 years ago

Seems to be loading very slow for me right now in Gmail. Maybe the Techcrunch attention has it crawling?

natep• 15 years ago

I'm going to give this a whirl, but I don't see any integration with the tasks GMail already has, built-in, so I can't get them to my phone. If you can sync tasks with GMail, then the android app I bought will take care of that sync step, right?

Also, if I do end up sticking with this, please don't sell this and shut down the service, like etacts did (the last YC company to do a gmail add-on, IIRC), although I never used that much.

robryan• 15 years ago

I'd imagine if Google made a generous talent acquisition offer to someone like this team to work on gmail productivity tools at Google it would be hard to refuse, like divvyshot and facebook photos.

m0hit• 15 years ago

a few comments after using it for a couple of days (not on my primary account):

a. The privacy policy should be a little more clear about the data (if any) being accessed from Gmail. Email is something around which people (or just me) take privacy seriously. The privacy policy is well written (not canned legalese), but does not cover issues around what kinds of data is collected. Rapportive (http://rapportive.com/privacy), also a YC startup has a very fresh approach to privacy policies.

b. at least for me, one of the best things about gmail are the keyboard shortcuts. Sparrow (http://www.sparrowmailapp.com/) does a great job of respecting gmail shortcuts.

c. Maybe they already have keyboard shortcuts, no way to know as there is no help or manual or faqs. (Not sure they need one either)

niccolop7• 15 years ago

Thanks for this Mohit - we take privacy very seriously, and only collect the necessary data to auto-complete collaborators emails within the widget.

Key board shortcuts are a great idea, that definitely increases accessibility and speed.

We do have a user guide: http://www.taskforceapp.com/guide - and we also maintain a getsatisfaction page.

tomnewton• 15 years ago

Someone needs to go down to their basement and reboot the mac mini that's running this thing ;)

dbalatero• 15 years ago

I keep receiving this error when trying to use Taskforce "No response from server, Reload?":

screenshot http://cl.ly/1h3U3e0u2i012j1v081G

Taskforce (YC W11) Helps You Organize Your Inbox and Become a Taskmaster

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