I just read that Ma.gnolia (my social bookmark application of choice) is starting to provide APML information (read the annoucement). This is very cool.
At BarCamp Nashville I was talking about a concept I had termed “3D Social Networking”. The basic idea was to add attention information to social networks to provide relationship depth. Then that relationship depth could be applied to help prioritize your social inbox. The greatest stumbling block to something like that is finding ways to capture that attention information.
Now we have RSS readers that are publishing APML (NewsGator and NetNewsWire), and Ma.gnolia is publishing APML about bookmarks. I could easily make statzen publish APML about who you link to on your own blog. I am thinking Tweeterboard could/should add APML since attention is essentially what they are tracking. So what communications are missing?
I think we need to reach a critical mass of attention information before APML will be really useful. In order to reach critical mass I think we would need APML information from email and from cell phones. Instant Messaging would be a plus.
An email attention service could pretty easily integrate with any IMAP server. Basically the service would watch the IMAP account and keep track of who you read, reply to, forward, etc. This would work if you used multiple interfaces for the same email account (Outlook/Mail, web client (gmail?), mobile phone).
I think there are apps that can pull call log information from your phone onto your computer. If I am not mistaken, MissingSync (which I use for my Treo) already pulls this information from my Treo. A single “attention observer” application could monitor those call logs as well as the IMAP email account.
Of course, how do you tie an RSS feed to an email address to several phone numbers to an IM account? It is like you need some social networking app that you control so that you can tie this information together. I am thinking DiSo could be the perfect provider.
I am starting to see a clearer picture of how this all could be implemented. The end goal would be to make all of this digital communication easier to manage.
