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Wanted: Social Intelligence Dashboard

May 13, 2008

If you are currently working on what I call a Social Intelligence Dashboard I would love to talk to you.  What do I mean by a Social Intelligence Dashboard?  The closest thing I have seen is LinkedIn’s profile page as seen below:

For example, in the section highlighted with the ‘number one’ you can see what are called ‘Network Updates’.  Each day I log into LinkedIn and look at this section to get a list of 25 or more people who are changing jobs, meeting new people, adding new clients, making recommendations or updating their status.  On the other side of the coin, in section highlighted with the ‘number two’ you can see who is looking at your profile, what industry they are in and what position they hold.  Very interesting data.

Many social networks use the ‘open social API‘, including: LinkedIn, MySpace, orkut, slide, Ning, FotoFlexer, iLike, Rockyou, Viadeo, Flixster, hi5, Salesforce.com, Theikos, and Virtual Tourist.  Other networks like Facebook and Twitter offer access to their own proprietary APIs.  Regardless of whether they use an open API or a proprietary API you can build applications that all for interaction the social data within the network.

What I am looking for is a company that has built or is building a dashboard that pulls data relative to one’s social network (i.e. across multiple networks) to help me retrieve useful information.  For example, lets say I am interested in ‘Competitive Social Intelligence’ data.  What if I could list all of my competitors, their employees, vendors and known customers into my dashboard and get a daily snapshot of the competitive landscape.  Today, I casually find this information on my LinkedIn ‘Network Update’ section.  I subscribe to an XML feed of the LinkedIn Network Update data and in my feed reader I sometimes notice competitors adding new contacts.  Sometimes these contacts are new hires (i.e. people who have recently joined their business), sometimes these contacts are client prospects (i.e. people who our competitors are talking to), and other times I notice that someone I want to hire is now available.  What if this data was gathered from multiple social networks (i.e. myspace, facebook, linkedin, orkut, bebo and twitter)?

I would love to be able to organize my dashboard based on my interest such as a) competitive intelligence, b) hiring and recruiting, c) opposition research, d) internal risk management, e) my personal life and so on.  Of course, the real value of this data, i.e. this system would be to push questions against it - i.e. marry social graph data with a business intelligence solution like Cognos thus creating ’social intelligence’ that could be sold to marketers, politicians and hedge funds…  So, whoever has built this - please give me a ring…

Written by Alexander Muse · Filed Under Blog, Startups 

Comments

One Response to “Wanted: Social Intelligence Dashboard”

  1. Kin Lane Says:
    May 13th, 2008 at 3:08 pm

    Definitely a huge need. I have blogged several times for the need, and requesting someone to build it.

    http://www.kinlane.com/2007/11/social-networks-email-and-more.html

    I have had several people contact me saying their were building widgets / modules for IGoogle and Netvibes that do a great deal of what we are looking for.

    I think that will be the way it needs to be done to meet everyones needs. An ala carte selection of widgets for your home page environment.

    The closest I’ve seen is this: http://www.pageonce.com/

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