Cloze (for iPhone)

• Pros

  Collects bits of communication from social networks and emails and puts them into a per-person context. Rightly emphasizes key people from your community. Good controls for customizing which people are "key." Free.

• Cons Can only connect one Twitter and one Facebook account (multiple email accounts supported, however). No way to merge contacts that Cloze mistakes for two different people. iPhone app not quite as intuitive and handy as website version.
• Bottom Line

  The iPhone app Cloze collects tweets, emails, Facebook posts, and other bits of communication from your contacts and prioritizes them based on people who are most relevant to you. It's a wonderful tool for getting relevant information about people in your network, although the Web version is more intuitive than the mobile app.

By Jill Duffy

What I like most about the Web app Cloze is precisely what's missing from its iPhone app: bits of communication from different places for a single person put into one view for the day. In other words, if my colleague tweets three times, posts on Facebook twice, and shares an article on LinkedIn all in a single day, I can see all that activity in one shot in Cloze. In the Cloze iPhone app, each of those items appears in a different screen, which you must swipe through to see. I still like what Cloze does on the mobile app, but I find it less efficient and interesting than how it plays out in the Web version.

Don't mistake Cloze for a social media aggregator, even though it may sound like one so far. What it does is much smarter than simply put a lot of disparate conversations onto one page. For one, it adds context (although again, it's watered down a little in the iPhone app). Second, Cloze scores each one of your friends and connections based on a number of factors regarding patterns of communication you have with them that indicate their importance?and, you can adjust the score if Cloze doesn't seem to get it right.

How Cloze Works
Cloze takes a three-step approach to sifting through your online communication. First it collects activity from various channels: LinkedIn, email, Twitter, and Facebook. Second, Cloze aggregates all those tweets and messages per person by day, letting you see for example every status update and LinkedIn post a client or your boss wrote today only, or yesterday, and so forth. Third, Cloze displays the per-person list of activity in a prioritize order based on people's importance to you. This last part relies on a Cloze score, which is loosely similar to a Klout score. You can override the algorithm and mark anyone you want as a "key" contact to make sure you see their updates.

The system succeeds in adding context which would be otherwise lost in just about any similar tool, such as HootSuite and the now unsupported but not quite dead Tweetdeck. Those two tools perform several functions that Cloze does not, however, so they aren't direct competitors. Both Tweetdeck and HootSuite let you keep an eye on messages directed right at you, whereas Cloze instead focuses on activity from important people regardless of whether they're trying to get your attention. But as with Tweetdeck and HootSuite, Cloze does let you "talk back" or respond to the activity you see from within the interface. A clean selection of response modes changes based on whether you're reading a tweet, Facebook status update, LinkedIn post, or email message. As much as I definitely see the value in using Cloze, I think it could be even better if it stole?er, "borrowed" some features from social media aggregators.

Signup, Setup, and Use
From the Cloze iPhone app or website Cloze.com you can sign up for a free Cloze account and authenticate access to your various social networks and email accounts. While you can connect multiple email accounts, and even multiple accounts from the same provider (e.g., two Gmail accounts), you can only connect one of each kind of social network, i.e., one Facebook account, one Twitter, one LinkedIn.

Cloze then analyzes all the communication you've had with various people across the systems you've initialized and rates each of your contacts on a 1 to 100 scale. People with the highest scores become your Key People, although you can customize who is and isn't among these VIPs. Cloze discloses a lot of information about its scoring algorithm, saying it takes into account dormancy (which measures the last time you and the person communicated), frequency (how often you two communicate), responsiveness (how quickly you respond to one another), privacy (how many of your conversations are private versus public), freshness (how often conversations cover new topics versus use the same language over and over), and balance (that is to say, two-way relationships).

By Jill Duffy Analyst, Software

Jill Duffy is a writer and software analyst, specializing in productivity software, iOS, and apps and gadgets for health and fitness. She writes the weekly Get Organized column, with tips on how to lead a...

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