Personal Relationship Manager

I am a tad obses­sive about my address book. While there are sev­eral thou­sand peo­ple in it, I tend to believe that I need to make sure that they stay cur­rent and I look to my address book as the cen­ter of my social net­work. but it ought to work more like a per­sonal rela­tion­ship manager.

I was recently describ­ing my update process to David Strom, after he had posted an entry on his blog about how poor the con­tact man­age­ment sys­tem in Gmail was, and I hit upon a real­iza­tion: A lot of the work that goes into keep­ing all that infor­ma­tion up to date seems to be some­thing that ought to be more suited to some level of automa­tion. Why is it that there is no real link­age between my address book, dif­fer­ent email sys­tems, social net­works, IM sys­tems, Skype (and other voice over IP solu­tions) and my mobile phone? Each of those appears to live in a silo, unable to offer me a full view of the peo­ple I know.

While Plaxo does a good job of syn­chro­niz­ing meta­data about peo­ple (What I would con­sider as rank, name, and ser­ial num­ber ie. the basics like phys­i­cal address, IM address, phone, and email), it has yet to evolve into a solu­tion that would give me a full view of the rela­tion­ships I have.

I also played with a num­ber of CRM pack­ages like Sug­ar­CRM but ulti­mately, they fail because their view is com­pletely sales-centric, with the idea of peo­ple being largely seen as mem­bers of a com­pany and sales prospects to be closed. I am not much of a sales­per­son (unless you con­sider push­ing new ideas on peo­ple a type of sale, which arguably it is) but my view of the world is much richer than that. I don’t want to think of peo­ple as buyers.

How­ever, the con­cepts of group­ing infor­ma­tion in CRMs is some­what attrac­tive. What I want is a view of my rela­tion­ship with peo­ple that would group:

• The basic type of address book infor­ma­tion avail­able in my address book and/or on my PDA and/or phone.
• The rich email dis­cus­sions I have had with said people
• The sim­i­larly rich IM dis­cus­sions I have had.
• SMS or MMS dis­cus­sions synched from my phone.
• Social Net­works interactions
• Feeds for the per­son (to things like their blog, their last.fm account, etc…)
• Track­backs and other blog related discussions.

The inter­est­ing thing is that each of this infor­ma­tion is avail­able in a dig­i­tized fash­ion but there is no cen­tral­ized point that allows me to see said infor­ma­tion about Joe Smith.

Why is that?

So I’d like to sug­gest the cre­ation of a new class of soft­ware called the “Per­sonal Rela­tion­ship Man­ager” or PRM. The pur­pose of a PRM would be to help you man­age your life instead of try­ing to man­age sales.

Basic Per­sonal Rela­tion­ship Manager

Of course, peo­ple are going to say that this prod­uct or that prod­uct solves my exist­ing prob­lem. In order to get those peo­ple to think before they push their solu­tion, let me describe in details what I want:

Con­tact Information

• Inte­gra­tion of my address book across dif­fer­ent email ser­vices: the con­tact part of this is largely com­pleted by Plaxo as they have man­aged to inte­grate and aggre­gate the address book from a num­ber of ser­vices. They need to pro­vide an inter­face to inte­grate oth­ers but they seem closer than any­one else on this.
• Inte­gra­tion of my address book across dif­fer­ent IM ser­vices: top line, the fol­low­ing would be needed from day one: AIM, MSN IM, Yahoo IM, Google IM, ICQ, and Jab­ber. I should not have to reen­ter infor­ma­tion for each.
• Inte­gra­tion of my address book across dif­fer­ent social net­works: this is get­ting trick­ier as most of the pop­u­lar social net­works look to that type of data as owned by them. How­ever, an ideal PRM would inte­grate and aggre­gate the infor­ma­tion my friends give on a social net­work into a sin­gle view.
• Inte­gra­tion of my address book and mobile and VOIP solu­tions: Caller ID on my VoIP solu­tions like Skype, Von­age, etc… and on my mobile phone should be inte­grated into a con­tact view. Today, my Treo asks me if I want to cre­ate a new con­tact or add a num­ber to a con­tact if it’s not in my address book already. I want that type of fea­ture across all voice com­mu­ni­ca­tion solution.

Con­ver­sa­tions and Status

• Inte­gra­tion of Email con­ver­sa­tions across all email ser­vices I use: At min­i­mum, this should allow to bring IMAP and POP into my PRM.
• Inte­gra­tion of IM con­ver­sa­tions across all IM ser­vices I use: Most IM ser­vices now have an archival fea­ture. That should be pre­sented as part of a user view.
• Inte­gra­tion of Social Net­work Sta­tus and related mes­sages across all socially-aware appli­ca­tions: From social net­work sta­tus to Last.FM music, from WeSabe to Twit­ter, my friends are updat­ing infor­ma­tion in a vari­ety of ser­vices. I should have a ded­i­cated news feed for each indi­vid­ual view.
• Inte­gra­tion of SMS/MMS his­tory: SMS and MMS sent to my mobile phone should be inte­grated into the overview of people.
• Pos­si­ble Inte­gra­tion of Voice­mail and audio mes­sages: At a later time, inte­grat­ing those into the pack­age would be a nice to have.

Input

• The PRM should man­age rela­tion­ships across social net­work: This ought not be aggres­sive but the sys­tem should check when peo­ple I know join a par­tic­u­lar net­work I’m on. If it finds a match, it ought to tell me that it did and, based on my set­tings, either ask for a link­age auto­mat­i­cally, or ask me to approve/deny ask­ing for such linkage.
• The PRM could (not should) become a sin­gle point of entry for broad­cast mes­sages. For exam­ple, if I change jobs (as I did recently), I would update that sys­tem with the job change sta­tus in a sin­gle loca­tion and it would update that infor­ma­tion across all the touch points where I have entered that information.
• The PRM could (not should) be a sin­gle entry point for sta­tus broad­cast. At the very least, it should allow me to set which sys­tem ought to be inte­grated via sim­ple rules sim­i­lar to fil­ter­ing (for exam­ple, I could say “If I update Ser­vice X, also update Ser­vice Y and Ser­vice Z.”

Pro­gram­ming Bits

• Low change foot­print: A new appli­ca­tion should not force me to change every­thing I already use. Instead, it should work with the appli­ca­tions I already use. This is prob­a­bly the hard­est thing in devel­op­ing the appli­ca­tion I’m high­light­ing as it will have to inte­grate with other services/software via some kind of ser­vice ori­ented archi­tec­ture but not take over their basic features.
• Fully address­able via API: The PRM, if built suc­cess­fully, would become cen­tral to man­ag­ing rela­tion­ships. As a result, it could become the source of data that appli­ca­tions could be built on. Because much of the data is per­sonal, a strong set of secu­rity and access con­trols would need to be in place in order to ensure that only the data peo­ple in my PRM want to dis­trib­ute is dis­trib­utable. On the other hand, the data should be for­mat­ted in such a con­sis­tent way that devel­op­ers could build appli­ca­tions that inte­grate with the PRM.
• Online/Offline address­able: Knock me off the net­work and I should still be able to have access to some of the data. Put me back on the net­work and I should be able to resync it all with the most up to date information.
• Decen­tral­ized: Peo­ple tend to pre­fer hav­ing their con­tact info in the hands of more than one providers as they feel that type of infor­ma­tion is largely per­sonal. A PRM solu­tion would thus have to be in a mode that can be fed­er­ated so no sin­gle entity is in full con­trol of the data.

So the pur­pose of the sys­tem, once built, would be to give me a view of my friends/contacts/etc… that is con­sol­i­dated. It would prob­a­bly pro­vide me with a high level con­tact overview (list­ing all the ways to get in touch with some­one), and then allow me to drill on the dif­fer­ent con­ver­sa­tions I’ve had with the per­son across a vari­ety of sys­tems (Email, IM, phone, social nets) as well as give me an overview of what they’ve been up to thanks to a sta­tus mes­sage and socially aware apps screen. And it would have to do all that with­out me chang­ing any of the sys­tems I’m cur­rently using. It’s a tall order but it’s one that, if sat­is­fied, could eas­ily become the cen­tral way for peo­ple to man­age their relationship.

If your prod­uct does indeed sat­isfy all those require­ments, you may have made a sale. And if you have an inter­est in devel­op­ing a PRM, I’ll be happy to be an alpha tester.