Email history = Social Graph?
Forget about Facebook and MySpace for your social graph.
A recent BITS column in NY Times mentions making your email history a lens on to your social network/graph. Both Yahoo and GMail have plenty of data. Microsoft does not have the data, but a big opportunity when you consider all of the email history residing on corporate Exchange servers.
Above is an email social graph, gathered from an Exchange server of a client. Purpose of the social graph was to provide a visual map to project leadership to help get their project unstuck. Social network analysis was applied to spot key connectors, clusters, bottlenecks, and measure the flow of information between the various groups in the project.
posted by Valdis at
12:12 PM
4 Comments:
Vladis - I am responding to your comment on My Blog. Thanks for the response! I looked at the links you provided, and I am quite intrigued! What do you think about the concept of an interactive mapping of blogs and wikipedia? Aside from the links on my post, are you aware of any research into this kind of thing? Thanks for the input! I really appreciate it!
By
Jeffrey Strickland, at 11/28/2007 8:29 PM
Nice work Valdis.
I find that using Google's Gmail is a very helpful way to navigate through my own mail archives - if you search by names and constrain accordingly, and then ook for the names of people cc'd on messages, you can manually dig out some next people to contact.
(automation would be welcomed of course)
By
Edward Vielmetti, at 12/14/2007 10:55 AM
I'm curious who the "key connectors" and "bottlenecks" were. There's got to be a funny Dilbert-y story there. Was upper management the bottleneck?
By
Ben, at 2/08/2008 4:02 PM
No Ben, it was the handful of "assistant project managers"[APMs] that upper management had put into place and set up their role.
After this map and feedback from other project participants, the APMs role was redefined from less of a gatekeeper to more of a problem-solver and connector.
By
Valdis, at 2/08/2008 4:09 PM
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