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Stay in better touch, be a better friend with Tinyblu

​Keep tabs on when you last spoke to or saw your friends to with this simple Web app to avoid long lulls in your relationships.

Matt Elliott Senior Editor
Matt Elliott is a senior editor at CNET with a focus on laptops and streaming services. Matt has more than 20 years of experience testing and reviewing laptops. He has worked for CNET in New York and San Francisco and now lives in New Hampshire. When he's not writing about laptops, Matt likes to play and watch sports. He loves to play tennis and hates the number of streaming services he has to subscribe to in order to watch the various sports he wants to watch.
Expertise Laptops, desktops, all-in-one PCs, streaming devices, streaming platforms
Matt Elliott
2 min read

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Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET


I am terrible at staying in touch. I don't like the phone, and I'm far from the most organized of people, so I often have long lapses in my contact with old friends. Tinyblu is a Web app that might help me be a better friend.

Named for the forget-me-not-flower, Tinyblu lets you monitor that last time you saw or spoke to or otherwise had contact with your friends. All that is required to create an account is an email address.

With your account created, you can then add friends to track, which Tinyblu calls lifelines. For each lifeline, you can give it a name and set the frequency for staying in touch.

There are three states for each lifeline:

  • Green smiley face = happy
  • Yellow face = waiting
  • Red frowny face = missing you

Be default, a lifeline remains happy for 14 days before turning yellow. It then stays yellow for seven days before turning red. You can, however, set a different frequency for each lifeline. When a lifeline becomes a red frowny face, Tinyblu emails you a reminder to get in touch with that person, but can also check a box to turn off email reminders for a lifeline. Click the Update button for a lifeline to enter you latest contact with that person, what you did and when you did it.

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Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET

You can also set up groups to separate, say, different groups of friends or personal friends from professional contacts. For each group, you can set a frequency for staying in touch and then that frequency will apply to all lifelines in that group.

In settings for Tinyblu, you can opt out of receiving email reminders and Tinyblu's newsletter.

(Via Lifehacker)