I read with interest that open-source messaging vendor Open-Xchange is building a "meta-address book" service that brings together your contacts from various social networking sites into "one continuous stream of updating contacts." While promising, I don't think it goes far enough.
It's nice to have a centralized address book. It's even better to analyze the connections between contacts and deliver services based on that data, as I recently argued.
One area in which this information would be hugely valuable is in connecting enterprises through their respective employees. Think about it: most companies spend far more money on sales and marketing than they do on product development. Why? Because customers pay the bills, obviously, and customers are hard to come by.
7-Degrees has an interesting solution called PeopleMaps that that crawls the Web for employment data on the contacts you have in Salesforce.com, and then presents an optimal (visual) contact chain to help enterprises figure out how they're connected to prospective partners or customers.
(Credit:
7-Degrees)
This is a useful way to map and monetize the "social graphs" of one's employees, but this, too, falls short of the full potential of a true "Web 2.0 address book," to use Tim O'Reilly's idea.
Open-Xchange is usefully connecting contacts into a meta address book, but I long for the day that someone connects those contacts through a meta address book, one that not only knows how well I know a contact, but also what sorts of things we like to do together and makes suggestions based on past history ("You and XXXX are in Boston at the same time - would you like me to arrange a lunch at Henrietta's Table again through OpenTable?).
This is when the address book becomes interesting, and when it becomes hugely monetizable by the enterprise.
For now, however, the enterprise largely treats its employees as drones with no lives (and, hence, no contacts) outside its payroll system. But if enterprises will look for ways to employees to improve their job performance by opening up their address books...we'll have discovered the next big thing in sales and marketing.
And someone will have created a billion-dollar business for themselves. Why not you?
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Over the weekend news broke that IBM Research has been working with personal mobile phone records to map social networks. Some may complain that Big Brother is watching, but the real question is why some company hasn't formed already to blend mobile data with IM and e-mail traffic to map and profit from the social graph.
(Credit:
Apple)
Think about it. My in-box already knows where I'm traveling, what I buy, etc. because my receipts go there. If someone were to merge this data with my phone records (easily had for the price of my AT&T login credentials), my e-mail log, and my Twitter, IM, and social network data, they'd know exactly who I know and where I'm likely to bump into them.
I'd gladly give up this data to facilitate those interactions.
Privacy wonks will bewail this apparent lack of concern for the sanctity of my data. But they'd be wrong.
It's not that I deprecate the value of my security. It's just that I value more the possibilities that arise when I share this data with a network of friends--sharing really only makes sense through a company or community that networks my address book with those of others I like and trust.
I can't fathom why someone hasn't done this yet. Tim O'Reilly has been talking about this Address Book 2.0 concept for years, and I've written on it several times, too. (See here and here.)
All the necessary data is sitting in my in-box or through easily accessed online or desktop applications. Someone simply needs to combine and process it.
Maybe that "someone," as Tim O'Reilly has suggested, could be the open-source community. We wouldn't want a community to shepherd the data, but to build the data connectors to a centralized service? Sure.
It needs to happen. I'd love to automatically be told that my good friend Mike is in London at the same time as I am, and have a service suggest a reservation at a favorite restaurant (which it would know through my past OpenTable reservations). I'd "pay" for that by giving up a lot of data.
I'm guessing you would, too. So who's going to build it?
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Google is apparently "getting ready to fully cast its social net over its web properties," according to TechCrunch, the latest signal being the automatic creation of a Google account when opening a YouTube account.
It's a clever, almost Microsoft-esque move designed to make Google the center of our social universe. It can't happen fast enough. But Google shouldn't stop with its own properties.
The social Web is currently a morass of mostly siloed choices. I can be on Facebook but also have to build a profile on LinkedIn, not to mention Digg, Slashdot, Bebo, Classmates.com, etc., etc. While we've seen marginal linkage start to form between these through initiatives such as OpenSocial, they don't get nearly far enough toward the one-stop social experience most of us want on the Web.
Yes, choice is good, so sometimes we assume a dizzying array of choices must be very good. Not so.
As I've argued before (PDF), what we need is not a myriad of choices but rather a limited, manageable set of quality choices. Markets trend toward such choice naturally by eliminating weak players and elevating strong competitors.
This is as it should be.
Fearful as I am of any one vendor controlling my Web experience, as Microsoft did for decades in desktop computing, I'm almost equally fearful of a disjointed Web experience that never really hits its stride because users are hamstrung among different social Web sites.
I want the Web to be just that: a connecting web, not an isolating one.
So, dominate me, Google. You've been a good steward of data and user experience thus far, albeit not without hiccups. Find some way to pull in my Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social data to my Google profile. Just ask: I'll give it to you. I have better things to do than waste time schlepping between different social Web sites. Save me the bother.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
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.
... Read more
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