This article was published on August 17, 2013

Relate.ly helps maintain great relationships with your most important contacts


Relate.ly helps maintain great relationships with your most important contacts

Relate.ly is an interesting new service designed to help maintain regular communication with the people that matter most in your personal and professional life.

The service tracks relationships based on your interactions with people across a range of services, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and email.

You import contacts from any of the aforementioned services, and Relate.ly indexes them — merging most of the duplicates across each service — to calculate a score (from 1-100) that indicates the health of your relationship based on your recent communication with that person.

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Each interaction is weighted differently. So, for example, sending an email is (obviously) more valuable than liking a status update on Facebook, but, nonetheless, Relate.ly pulls in data from across the Web to give you a more contextual view of how you and each person have communicated.

From here, you ‘track’ the relationships that matter the most, specifying how often you want to stay in touch with each selected contact.

Going forward, the Relate.ly dashboard will show when a relationship score drops below that target, meaning that it’s time to reach out to this person to keep your relationship strong.

The service also sends a daily email that recommends one person who you should reconnect with, and what medium might be best.

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Relate.ly co-founder Matt Kress tells TNW that the service is ideally suited to sales teams, or any other business unit that relies on relationships, since regular contact is a key part of the job. The service can also show which members of a team have the best relationships with any given company or partner.

It isn’t just for sales team though. As a journalist, it can help my relationships with companies be about more than just the latest news, and I’ve enjoyed using the service to keep my best contacts warm. Or just track interactions with my boss (!) — but there are doubtless uses for any industry:

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The company, which is bootstrapped and not currently seeking funding, is still in its early stages, but it has already picked up a number of paying customers without anything more than word of mouth.

Updates to the service are regular — manual contact merging was among the most useful recent additions — and Kress says there are plans to bake in a messaging feature that enables users to send messages to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter contacts right from the Relate.ly dashboard.

There are no mobile apps for now, but the Relate.ly site renders decently on mobile browsers thanks to its responsive design.

You can test Relate.ly out for free via a 30-day trial, but anything further will cost you. The service is priced from $27 per month, while a one-year subscription comes in at $270 — that gives you two months for free.

➤ Relate.ly

Headline image via Thinkstock

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