The Zimbra opportunity: A true social network

One of the primary problems with sites like Facebook and MySpace is that they provide a somewhat specious view of one's "social graph" (dumb but popular way of saying "true network of relationships"). I have ~2,400 people in my address book, but only a fraction of those are true "friends" in the sense that normal people use the term. My email system (as well as my phone records and IM history) knows exactly who are my real friends (as Tim O'Reilly frequently notes). Friendship without communication is...not really friendship.

Now the New York Times is reporting that Google and Yahoo are merging social networking into the place where most true networks converge: email.

Ignore Orkut, OpenSocial, Yahoo Mash and Yahoo 360. Google and Yahoo have come up with new and very similar plans to respond to the challenge from MySpace and Facebook: They hope to turn their e-mail systems and personalized home page services (iGoogle and MyYahoo) into social networks.

Web-based e-mail systems already contain much of what Facebook calls the social graph - the connections between people.

That's why the social networks offer to import the e-mail address books of new users to jump-start their list of friends. Yahoo and Google realize that they have this information and can use it to build their own services that connect people to their contacts.

The major problem I see with these services is that they're not reflective of the email account in which people spend most of their lives: their work email.

Enter Zimbra. Zimbra offers an enterprise-class email system that also allows users to integrate their personal email accounts (using POP and IMAP). More and more enterprises are going with Zimbra, and more and more social services (like Wikipedia, Facebook, etc.) have been integrated with Zimbra.

So here's the challenge for Zimbra/Yahoo: let users center their social lives in Zimbra, which is a more natural way to collaborate than a web site like MySpace. Help developers to connect their site data into Zimbra to make it a rich ecosystem of social data/graphs/whatever. Then record and meaningfully display the true social graph revealed by email/IM (Yahoo IM)/phone (VoIP integration with Zimbra is hot) records.

I would pay for that. I'd use that happily. I'd give up more of my personal information to glean real value from that data. And I'd be happy to have Zimbra do the same.

[rfuller2007]

social network before its time

david gilmour over at tacit built a system that automatically mines email and proactively suggests connections between people emailing about similar subject matter. it's an enterprise play and companies with far flung researchers are using it. it's not new, or open source, but gets more and more relevant all the time.

[dogStar1000]

Enterprise-class?

Does "Enterprise-class" mean - written in Java to be as complicated as possible thereby increasing its value perception by brain-dead managers?

In all seriousness, my experience of Zimbra is that it comes as a single bundle of modified versions of Postfix and OpenLDAP with its own hand-rolled IMAP server.

Monolithic bundles of vendor-modified software are distinctly sub-optimal if your looking for a modular and highly scalable architecture using standard or transparently modified Open Source packages.

Given Matt's association with Alfresco, perhaps I'm posting on the wrong blog?

[Matt Asay]

lol, no I'm not tainted by my Java affiliation

But you can do "modular" and Java in the same application. I think Alfresco does this increasingly well with its "AMP" extensions. Zimbra is doing it through Zimlets. I'm not a developer so I'm not qualified to judge whether these *actually* work for developers, but I've heard quite a bit of commentary that they do, in fact, do this.