Steve Sanderson

I’ve always wanted some simple ‘personal relationship manager’, i.e. the problem is that I’ve got friends and acquaintances I want to keep up with – but I am lousy at reminding myself to follow-up when I don’t see them regularly. I want a way to:

• get a dashboard that shows me what’s new with people in my social networks
• organize the dashboard based on some heuristics on what social networks are more important than others (e.g. ex-Excite people, current co-workers, etc.)
• default and customizable alerts to notify me
  • when it’s been a long time since I communicated with someone
  • when something about those people or their company has changed
• a single place to view and edit some basic info on a person (e.g. notes)
• all based on an understanding of my social networks (e.g. declared social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, twitter and implicit social networks like email)

How to solve this? Up to now, I’ve thought about ways to augment my email, i.e. using my email history and address book. From the looks of it, Xobni does something similar with Outlook and there’s chatter they may do this eventually for hosted email (e.g. gmail). However, last night I realized that (for the moment) much of what I care about could be in LinkedIn. Surely someone has solved this via a LinkedIn application… Unfortunately, no, e.g I didn’t even find any way to keep notes on other people in my network. No problem, I’ll write an application… but right away their stance isn’t encouraging. While their wording does not encourage me to take an exploratory run at something new on LinkedIn,  I’ll apply and see what happens.