Apologies for such a long hiatus…with the vacation and role change at work…I was a smidge busy. Expect a pile of witty posts to come.
I’ve recently joined the beta of SkyDeck. A service that reads your phone bills and attempts to form a true social graph based on the people you call most often and on the people that call you. The idea is very good, I think most people will agree that our phone is our most important communication device. And SkyDeck attempts to mine this device for our true connections. It even shows you the strength of a relationship based on the number of calls. I had some technical trouble with it, with Verizon not letting it grab all of my old call logs but overall it was a pleasant experience. It even surprised me with some of the strengths associated with the different connections.
Of the top of my head I can think of two things they could incorporate and they are probably working on these already.
1. Instead of solely using cellphone bills why not use the call logs on your actual phone. Installing a little app that continuosly feeds this data live into the system.
2. Do the same thing to my email then combine the two…phone + email as I’ve said before is where you can really find your connections.
It’ll be interesting to see where SkyDeck will go, definitely a company to watch.
But on a completely different note. What I can’t wait for is “Minority Report” style computing and data access. It’ll come in my lifetime…but when?
These sound like cool ideas and cool services but their potential to be accessed and abused by governments and other non-desireables makes me incredibly wary.
Thanks for the feedback! And you’re thinking the same way we are about what Skydeck should do in the future.
Taylor, you are right, but remember that a lot of people can get access to this data if they want to: your employer if you are on a business mobile phone plan or use a business email account, the police if they get a warrant, the NSA without a warrant it seems. And all sorts of firms boast that they can get a copy of anyone’s cell phone records for the right price. Our focus is on getting your data into your hands, so that you can use it.
Best
Jason