ベン・ギルド (Ben Guild)


Accounts is "on pause." Stay tuned for what's next.

I've pulled Accounts from the App Store because the next generation of the product will be vastly different from its current iteration.

A lot of great ideas were demonstrated in this release, and people will be able to enjoy both these and others when the next iteration is announced and made available. For now, I want to limit any additional signups before our new product is debuted.

Accounts website (final screenshot)

Conceptually, I'm really excited about what Accounts has accomplished. What is important to me about the next steps for any social network or contacts matching/sharing/connecting platform is that no companies “own” the network's unobfuscated data. It's your data… based on the real-world connections that you've made with real people. That is life.

Although Accounts focused not only on sharing minimal data with others by sharing said data selectively with the individual groups that your contacts were organized into, I still feel that for any amount of data shared on whatever social network it is that we all use going forward… said data must be completely and absolutely obfuscated on said network from any and all involved service-providers, including itself.

Any service-provider can not only be compromised in terms of spying or security, but also may choose to act in ways that are only in their best interests and not yours. Today's providers already make it nearly impossible to smoothly migrate your data to any other service in its entirety because such a departure would not be in their best interests. This has to stop, because everyone should only use services because they like them and want to stay with them, and not because they have to.

Accounts aimed to ease these constraints by giving people a universal and neutral way to stay connected whilst only sharing minimal data amongst users that they were connected to. But, something was missing from this product, and that “thing” will not be missing from the next. Stay tuned for that.

The service will remain active and reachable until April 30th, 2015. After this date, all operations will be “paused,” and sync services to the released iOS software will no longer be available. The Android and web versions' releases for this generation of product will be postponed indefinitely in lieu of their successors. The current iOS app will no longer be available for download after today.

Thanks for checking it out, and my apologies for any inconvenience. Please follow me for updates in the future!