"Your social memory" works much better than "manage your friends and family". So take this as a complaint about the HN headline, not about the site itself.

I wouldn't have clicked through if it said "your social memory". That sounds like some NGO talking about causes.

But this I instantly understood.

Lots of people use planners and datebooks to remember important dates (like your high school best friend's upcoming wedding!) And lots of people use journals or diaries to take notes or keep memories.

These things are less about "managing" and more about cultivating relationships and memories. "Organizing" is a word with less controlling vibes. Maybe start there and take a journey through the thesaurus? http://www.thesaurus.com/browse/organizing?s=t

Ohhh that's a very good idea. I disliked the notion of management, and organization makes much more sense. Thanks a lot!

Here are some other ones that might help:

- stay in touch/keep in touch

- coordinate

- focus

- balance

- "look after", as in "look after you relationships"

How about terms related to tending a garden?

"nurture" "Attend to" "Mind to" "Tend to" "Cultivate" "Nourish"

Garden metaphors always do it for me.

The word "manage" has to go, but it's a tough one. Any word having to do with augmentation is too robot/AI sounding. I like the idea of "cultivating," as in the Dale Carnegie approach or the another commenter's awesome uncle with the spreadsheet. But it's a balance of memory and cultivation.

Anyway, nice work.

My memory is terrible, I've wanted something like this for ages to manage my life in general, love it!!

I would like this to be hosted for $12/year.

Blush. Thanks for the feedback. Glad that all the hours sitting on my couch coding this tool helps you today :-D

I think you could convey this pretty well if you changed the first screen shot on your page a little.

Cut out the actual browser window part, and paste that on to an image of an address book/planner with the same information about Jim Halpert. That way it's an instant visual association with an existing non-computer idea.

The product is super cool and useful, although I hope you won't limit it to being a single-user thing because it could actually evolve into an amazing social tool. But I would really lose the word 'manage', it kind of suggests that personal relations are just another kind of task which is apt to make the people being related to feel devalued because they're not important enough to be given space in someone's day-to-day consciousness.

poetic terms that say nothing

?!

If poetic terms say nothing then why is poetry (both literary and lyrical, as in songs) so popular? Social relations are not purely functional or transactional, although they often have those aims or characteristics. Friendship and warm familial relations are based on feelings. I often say that hackers need to develop better emotional intelligence and this is a good example.

Would you take someone on a date and say 'statistics indicate that we have a high degree of socioeconomic compatibility and synergistic aesthetic appeal, suggesting that we should pursue a merger strategy so as to maximize our mutual future advantage?' Most people would prefer to hear something along the lines of 'I love you and want to marry you.'

I understand that your product is aimed at busy people who are invested in their work and want to handle their social relations at least as well as their business ones. But you need to be cognizant of their motivations for doing that; because they like, love and generally care about the people in their lives that lie outside their career. It is that drive which might move someone to start using your product, and you must appeal to that drive, which is an emotional one, in emotional terms.

Incidentally, calling it Monica carries connotations of having an assistant called Monica that helps you remember those little personal obligations and although I'm sure you didn't intend this it gives me a sort of sexist vibe because historically such tasks have often been delegated to stereotypically female subordinates by busy executives (think Pepper Potts in the Iron Man story franchise).

Even though both men and women seem to prefer female identities for things like GPS and virtual assistants, a gendered brand identity like this is likely to limit your appeal to one half of the population straight out of the gate. The brand values you wish to attach to your product are reliability, loyalty, and patience, so it would be worth your while to dig through mythology and fiction in search of characters who are associated with those qualities and then develop variations from any particularly inspiring name stems you encounter so as to leverage those psychic associations.

You know what I meant. I didn't imply poetry meant nothing. Of course not. But I see SAAS more and more describing their product in ways that are too marketing to me. I prefer to go straight to the point.

Regarding the gender, I don't know what to think about this. It's not by any mean a way to degrade women. I will definitely consider choosing another name because I understand how some people could be offended by that, which is not at all my intention, ever.

For what it's worth, I don't see what all the fuss is about the name. In fact, I like it. Do these same people complain about other software named after people, like Cassandra, Linux, MySQL, Haskell etc...

Of course I know what you meant, but I'm trying to give you some free branding advice that would substantially increase the likely uptake for your tool.I am not a marketing oriented person either, but successful businesses often spend about the same money/effort on marketing as they do on product development. That's certainly the magic formula in the film industry - 50% on the production and 50% on the ad campaign.

I agree and thanks a lot for your comment. I know I should be much better at marketing, it's nearly the most important criteria for a software to succeed.

You might choose a name like Courtney, that is used by both men and women.

> personal relations are just another kind of task which is apt to make the people being related to feel devalued because they're not important enough to be given space in someone's day-to-day consciousness.

You seem to indicate that this devaluation is a sort of false accusation to which we should not make ourselves vulnerable.

Yet, that subordinate clause rings true to me as an independent statement.

Why should I let just any person (particularly family; none of mine know CS) occupy any nontrivial amount of space in my day-to-day consciousness; when such space could instead be used by something useful?

Get a neurotypical person to explain to you.

To me it's "an external brain for your social life".

Here's a non-boring video. It has some good product taglines.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2UPoHJAOSQ