Cc:Betty brings an electronic assistant to your Twitter account, too
Cc:Betty, a service that helps organize your email, is now bringing in other communication streams too, starting with microblogging service Twitter.
The Palo Alto, Calif., company rolled out some basic Twitter integration today. It’s still built around the company’s concept of a “mailspace” — basically, when someone sends a copy of an email to “betty@ccbetty.com” (Betty’s supposed to be your a virtual assistant), it creates a page on the Cc:Betty site that tracks the conversation, along with related files, images, events, and other elements. Now people who prefer to communicate via Twitter can contribute to the conversation too. They just send a direct message to “ccbetty” along with the conversation number assigned by the site, and the message gets added to the mailspace. Also, when you look at profiles of other users in the conversation, you can see their latest tweets (assuming they’ve added their Twitter account info).
There’s still a lot of work to do here — remembering/copying the conversation number is a lot less convenient than just cc’ing Betty, and there’s no way to see the flow of the conversation in Twitter, the way you can in email. But it’s the first step in a direction that Cc:Betty needs to move in, away from just organizing email (where it’s less essential for people who are happy with their existing email programs) and more towards a broader service that centralizes a conversation, no matter whether people participate via email, Twitter, Facebook, or another communication medium of their choice.
“Bottomline, this is Betty’s first step in expanding her range out of just email,” chief executive Michael Cerda says. “We’ll go very wide on this, very quickly. As for the Twitter functionality, it too will get more seamless, more comprehensive. We’re just scratching the service.”
Cc:Betty has raised a $1.5 million seed round from Venrock and assorted angel investors. It launched the beta test of the service at the DEMO conference in March.
(By the way, if you want to see Cerda play with the band featured in the screenshot below, you should come to VentureBeat’s MobileBeat conference on July 16.)
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About the Author, Anthony Ha
Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on enterprise technology, cloud computing, and tech policy. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.
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