Mapping and honing our interconnections
NEW YORK (AP) — The notion that we wander the planet with no more than six degrees of separation from one another is more than just urbane trivia to Antony Brydon. It's the basis for his new company. Brydon heads Visible Path, a startup that mines computer networks to determine who in a company knows whom in the world, and how well. Then Visible Path's software helps Tom ask Dick to introduce him to Harry, hopefully injecting a personal touch into cold sales pitches and other awkward interactions. Visible Path and a similar startup, Spoke Software, are among dozens of tech companies in arcane-sounding fields — social network analysis, knowledge management, data mining — that after years of hype are now able to efficiently plumb social networks to enhance work and human relations. But the big question is whether people will reject these technologies as too intrusive.
"Anything that disrupts how we normally interact with each other will not work," said Valdis Krebs , who developed seminal software 15 years ago that maps interactions in an organization. "We often get the technology right, but we screw up the sociology." The software from Visible Path and Spoke meticulously scans computers to hunt for contact information in electronic calendars and address books. It tallies whom the users have e-mailed and how long it took for the recipients to respond.
Say you're in sales at XYZ Corp., and you'd like to pitch XYZ's latest money counter to Bill Gates. In seconds, the software can inform you that sadly, no one in the company knows the Microsoft chairman. But — and here is the real power of this software — let's say XYZ's law firm agreed to have its contacts linked with XYZ's database. Suddenly, you might find that someone in XYZ's advertising department is close with an XYZ lawyer who knows the Microsoft founder. You wouldn't be given those people's names. But the software would e-mail the ad guy, telling him you're seeking an introduction to Gates.
The ad guy could decline to help without letting you know he was the one who rejected you. But the software would take note, and possibly downgrade its assessment of your relationship. "I was actually blown away," said Jay Ziskrout, chief operating officer of the CMJ Network, a music publisher in New York that has tested the VisiblePath software for six months. "Instead of sending a mass e-mail to my whole office — or walking around to everyone saying, 'Do you know this person? Do you know so-and-so?' — this is really a great way of doing it." Spoke and Visible Path expect their first customers to be sales forces eager to make the most of their members' relationships. But the prospects for their kinds of software engines are much broader.
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"I think something really big is about to unfold here," said David Gilmour, founder of Tacit Knowledge Systems , which scans corporate networks to determine who knows what, based on the e-mails they write. Tacit's customers include ChevronTexaco and defense contractor Northrop Grumman. "Within five years, software that chases around and picks up the bread crumbs you leave behind, and does so for the benefit of you as an individual, will be ubiquitous," Gilmour said. Having your files monitored by a computer might seem creepy. That's why Tacit — which is partially funded by the CIA — employs a model similar to that of Visible Path and Spoke, merely brokering exchanges of otherwise encrypted information between willing parties. "What I know and who I know depends on who's asking the question," Gilmour said.
Researchers at Hewlett-Packard have developed a system called SHOCK (social harvesting of community knowledge), in which a computer develops a private profile of its user's interests, based on her e-mail and Web browsing. HP's Bernardo Huberman thinks of it as "a bag of words on your machine." No one has access to the bag, except a special search engine in the computer network. If Jane wanted help analyzing a flower business in Argentina, SHOCK could detect that someone had been researching rose prices in South America. Jane wouldn't know Jack had the information, and he wouldn't know she was the one asking — until he agreed to help. Now HP is exploring whether cell phones could perform similar information-sharing for networking or dating applications.
If my phone could talk to yours without our knowing, and the devices discovered that we have many the same numbers in our contact lists, might we be interested in meeting? But even boosters fear that an incautious provider could hurt the field with a big breach of privacy. Or maybe a company will tell its workers that some are being let go because the new software has determined they are less productive than they seem. "So far there hasn't been the Chernobyl of social network analysis," said Krebs, whose clients include a church wanting insights about its warring factions. "But believe me, it's out there." Consultants like Krebs also wonder whether such software is truly able to detect nuances in people's relationships or prompt them to share valuable resources with someone they don't know well.
"Like crooks keep two sets of books, I think people are going to keep two sets of Outlook files," Krebs said of the popular e-mail software. "One for Visible Path, one for themselves."
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