The tagline of this new Internet startup grabs you – The Inbox is Human Again. A little more read & you realize that this is an email enhancement application….& then some.
Cloze by founders Dan Foody & Alex Cote tries to bring a “human touch” to emails, while at the same time automating the process of understanding which email is important to a user & which is not. This startup scans a user’s email’s Inbox, views all the “conversations” that he/she has had from all the social networking accounts like Facebook, Twitter, etc & based on this research will then recommend the people who are important in that user’s day-to-day life.
To start, you need to create an account with cloze or download its smartphone app. Once that’s done just keep adding the social networking sites that you want cloze to work on. Once cloze has finished doing its initial survey, you shall be sent the analysis report about your key people. In this way a user can aim at having a clutter-free Inbox. The final output is one viewing window for all your contacts from your emails or social networking sites.
This app does one more thing -it uses various tags for a user’s contacts depending on the priority they hold in the final analysis. That’s what’s called the Cloze Score. The topmost position on the score is for the Key People, followed by the other categories down the order of priority like Other Mail, Bulk Mail & Losing Touch. The Cloze Score is determined on various factors such as Dormancy, Frequency, Responsiveness, Privacy, Freshness and Balance, & ranges from 0-100. Obviously the higher the score, the higher you are tagged, & thus your importance rises.
The Cloze Score is not a measure of a user’s social media influence, though, nor is it a number to be featured as an accomplishment or badge. It also does not rate his/her offline interactions.
The entire exercise is geared to help users concentrate on their important emails & push the unimportant ones for later viewing and this is restricted not to the Inbox but also to Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Quite similar to another startup we write about on these pages called MailBox.
Here are some more features of this new Web based app:
Users can tap on a contact & cloze flashes all the conversation history, contact details or even emails in order to update him/her on the person who matters most. If a user wishes to know more about a certain person, cloze crawls into their Facebook or Twitter accounts and makes private notes on them & there you are with complete information about them without any probing.
There is a list called Losing Touch which is basically an auto generated list for people with whom users are not in touch on regular basis. These people get transferred to this list. Cloze also prompts users ways to improve their communications with their contacts. One can also improvise by viewing the Cloze Score board & accordingly work towards a healthy relationship. Once the user feels he/she has a better relation with a particular person, the latter’s category can be manually upgraded.
Cloze is a venture-backed company based in Cambridge, MA, USA founded in February 2012. The app is free to use.
Image credit: Cloze
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