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Build a personal relationship manager on LinkedIn... maybe

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.
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Clarity in the cloud & congratulations to whurley

Open source “evil genius” whurley has announced he will be writing a column for InfoWorld on cloud computing, and it appears that his initial focus will be to help bring clarity to ‘just what cloud computing means’. I’m looking forward to reading it.

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Oh CouchDB, Why Do I Love Thee So...?

Ok, so why are my friends and co-workers noticing my minor obsession about CouchDB? There’s a few reasons. First, I have a long-term unlove-affair with RDBMS. Why?

  • I started off working in the UNIX kernel (V6 anyone?) and there's no stinking databases in there... just some filesystem stuff
  • After learning and using C, I jumped to Smalltalk and like a newborn duckling, I was imprinted by the Smalltalk view of the world - which forever set my idea about persistent data + behavior.
  • Along the way, I bumped into Thomas Malone's work on Object Lens and OVAL - which further evolved my thinking about collaborative work, semi-structured data and toolkits to enable end-users to compose their own tools; incuding the notion that not every object needs behavior- sometimes it's just data (e.g. the archetypical business card is just some useful semi-structure data).
  • And finally - the cognitive dissonance between the relational model and the common OO / prototype-based languages / domain models was constantly bothered me.
Yes - I know they've been effective and have benefit in lots of scenarios, however...

Secondly, for a piece of ‘middleware’, CouchDB has great elegance and great congruence with the bevy of potential uses, i.e. it appears to afford us the possibility to think about our problem/solution domains and our softwares internal models in in very similar fashions - with some very interesting beneficial side-effects (e.g. eventual consistency, availability)

And finally, there’s some rumblings of a new application model all together - reminiscent of the agents buzz from over a decade ago, i.e. Chris Anderson’s Sharable apps - where a CouchDB instance is sufficiently capable to become an application platform and that via the synchronization model, multiple instances of an application could run in a distributed & isolated manner and then synchronize and migrate as needed to different environments, i.e. run locally on laptops and sync and migrate up to centralized servers and then back down as needed. Instead of a rigid & pre-defined deployment structure, it’s more of an organic ‘shape’ adjusting as needed. If this is a new degree of freedom, the potential is huge.

So, while I’m looking for the right opportunity to try some of these ideas out - I’ll continue this minor obsession and see where it leads.