Basically there are a couple of concepts that need to be coupled to build to a CRM for your friends, family and professional contacts.
Disclaimer: I’m aware that this might be a tool for man, rather than woman (they seem to have this down to an art)
Here is the list of concepts to be connected to give people their own place to track the relations of their acquaintances:
- Persons, companies: Name, Addresses, etc
- Relationship quantification and rating between the person and you (ie. friend level, professional level (with discipline), family level.
- Relationships between the Persons (this person was married with that person, this person is a kid of these two persons).
- History: basically when did somebody live at, have a relation with, worked at, got a child with, etc
That final touch (the history aspect: 4) will give the most crucial dimension to most social networking sites we already have. There is no way to track the relationships of people in time with those websites, or not in the extension one can deduce a narrative.
This tool by the way does not have to be made as an online service, you might even want to put all this offline, as it might not be for others to see (new kids, relationships, etc). It might however connect with facebook, linkedin to parse updates made by the persons and companies.
When changing address or relationship, all the data goes lost in a normal (electronic) address book. So I want to make an address book which tracks address- and relationship changes. Here’s a small data diagram of the idea. I do have to update it because the idea did change since I came up with it.
Updated 2011-06-02 (made an edit to update the piece to relate to facebook and linkedin (not known to me at the time).