- The convenience factor is compelling, like auto-complete.
- As a v1 you can see the true magic in a seamless signup.
On the downside:
- It does something unusual / unexpected / creepy.
- It's too slow - noticeable lag vs. say the auto-suggest in search.
- If accuracy is good why bother exposing that to the user? Intercom.io does this all in the backend off of email only registrations and seems to have about a 70% hit rate. The data is useful to business owner but I'd bet the user would feel less enthusiastic knowing that I have their personal fb, twitter, linkedin, etc as soon as they register.
I am sure that svbtle can show the A/B data validating this is worthwhile for THEIR audience.
But I'm not sure for a broader use case this is going to help due to the factors mentioned above.
That's a great point. A prior startup I worked at used a nice social referral tool, whose name slips my mind right now, but their backend would asynchronously pull Facebook, Twitter, etc. links for each of your customers. It was really convenient and worked for 80-90% from what I recall.
> Broadly speaking, we collect information in three ways: (1) when you provide it directly to us, (2) when we obtain information about you or your company through trusted third parties or indexing systems, and (3) passively through technology such as “cookies”.
This is a disconcerting use of "secret sauce," particularly since email addresses have the same weight nowadays as usernames.
I did this a few weeks ago and magic signup does not work for my email address.
My guess is that Magic is using Clearbit's API as a base, then layering on their own scraped data sources as well, which is a pretty common strategy for these types of APIs.
Opt out for Pipl is here: https://pipl.com/directory/remove/
Or maybe the goal of the service is for web sites to surreptitiously get more data from users who are otherwise unwilling to provide it, but are somehow willing to provide an e-mail address tied to their real identity?
We saw much higher FB auth rates on desktop web than mobile—bad enough that we may forego Facebook login on mobile web entirely.
* - AFAIU if you set a sync passphrase you also get some (probably limited) form of "zero knowledge" client-side encryption; this makes me hopeful they implemented it properly i.e. "we literally can't access your shit" https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/1181035?hl=en
I would never sign up to service with such form.
On the other hand… yeah, creepy as hell.
I'm curious about the pricing model: $20/mo for 2,000 requests. I wonder if you still pay for the request if it returns a non 200 or if their API can't find a name.
So far two dead relatives that never really used the internet have been "marketing matched" to my email address. So I get spam for my deceased grandmother and uncle. Its a little jarring. I'm not sure what kind of matching they do but clearly its not working.
Plus isn't the point of using a service being able to decide to match it with twitter, Facebook or just not link to those things.
Honestly, how much time do you really save by auto completing a couple of fields? This seems like a solution in search of a problem.
Also, while I don't have the data to speak for other users, I personally don't see myself paying for any service that presents my own personal information to me before I even know what the fuck it is.
I couldn't even try it because my browser's autocomplete automatically completed all fields.
Doesn't everyone has autocomplete?
Also, it's pretty creepy.
I would be turned off from a website or service that prepopulated a lot of my information without my consent.
Tried about eight of my email addresses. School and work ones did nothing, and neither did my Outlook.com account, or Yahoo.com.
For Gmail addresses it just pulled the name from my Google+ account for the one that had it, and failed on all the rest.
Not super impressive IMO. Especially considering all my email addresses are some variation on firstname.lastname or flastname.
But more than that... "Because it helps your users save time, Magic increases conversion rates and makes the web easier to use."
There's one heck of an unfounded/unvalidated assumption.
oAuth/Persona, and then don't ask for anything else until its actually needed.
And now you have (for the logged-into-oauth-provider case) a 2 click login system. It can not get easier than that
I hate how I only get those prompts when the field matches whatever fields Chrome thinks it should, yet many companies don't use these field ID's, so Chrome sits there stupidly.
I would love the ability to teach Chrome that this is a form and yes these are valid fields. Maybe somehow submit it to Google and have them update whatever regex they use. I feel like it fails about 50% of the time.
