We are replacing our integration with Google Docs with a “friends of friends” model.

The Background:

For the past 2 years, Kerika has offered an “auto-completion” feature that let you type just a few characters of someone’s name, and then have a list of matching names and emails appear from your Google Docs. It looked like this:

This was actually a very helpful feature, but it was also scaring off too many potential users.

The Problem:

When you sign up as a new Kerika user, Google asks whether it is OK for Kerika to “manage your Google Contacts”. This was a ridiculous way to describe our actual integration with Google Contacts, but there wasn’t anything we could do about this authorization screen.

We lost a lot of potential users thanks to this: people who had been burned in the past by unscrupulous app developers who would spam everyone in their address book. So, we concluded that this cool feature was really a liability.

The Solution:

We are abandoning integration with Google Contacts with our latest software update. Existing users are not affected, since they have already authorized Kerika to access their Google Contacts (and are, presumably, comfortable with that decision), but new users will no longer be asked whether it is OK for Kerika to “manage their Google Contacts”.

Instead, we are introducing our own auto-completion of names and email addresses based upon a friends of friends model: if you type in part of a user’s email, Kerika will help you match this against the names of that are part of your extended collaboration network:

• People you already work with on projects.
• People who work with the people who work with you.

We hope this proves to be a more comfortable fit for our users; do let us know what you think!