A few days a go I wrote a post on my Fast Company Experts Blog called “Are you monitoring your Pulse” - covering the evolution of the Plaxo
product and my light review of the new Pulse feature that “brings life to your address book” as they say. I love the idea of being able to aggregate the digital activities outside the blog read, twitter update or my crutch of a Facebook feed scan. So for this lazy guy that has had his address book online for years and has found new value in the mundane but increasingly complicated issue of identity management - I am thrilled.
In a read of the O’Reilley Radar recently, Tim posts about the “address book 2.0” and social networking fatigue. Bringing the issue of network and identity portability to conversation. At the basic level, your address book is the fundamental data source from which your network exists. In my case, 4,900 plus touch points of my personal and business contacts. Believe me I do not want to know what they all are doing - probably about 10% or so would be fine. However, if you consider the issues of portability and discovery, it is the core of open network or social network interoperability. The ability to dabble across multiple networks, bring your own or just lerk into the lives of others.
I think an interesting development beyond the management of identity, publishing or network presence comes in the monitoring of your service and corporate relationships. Sure it’s great to know when your pal had a coffee with so and so or I am flying here and there - but is not more interesting to have a Pulse on your service and corporate relationships to understand what their digital contribution offers. Certainly, not every entity in this network is blogging or offers a feed of their latest happenings - but monitor those that do. For those that don’t set up a Google Alert and aggregate them as feeds (yes some Gmail workarounds for that). These are the relationships you rely on - schools, churches, stores, airlines, etc… Spend time with tracking what matters or lend a hand to offer to get these contacts into the 2.0 world.
What are you doing to increase your digital pulse or those of those your rely on?
Tags: "address book 2.0", Identity
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