The Google of Communications
Being ultra-connected is great in many ways, but it also creates a myriad of problems, as I’ve written previously. The biggest problem for most of us is the constant barrage of incoming communications requests – email, voice, IM and so on. The average American worker is interrupted over 70 times per day. Even if each interruption is just three minutes long, it can take 10 to 15 minutes to refocus on the task being performed prior to the interruption, especially if that is a task requiring creativity. It’s a real challenge to manage this constant flow in a sensible manner without being unresponsive, or rude.
In many ways, this problem is a lot like the problem that search engines solve. Do you recall the early days of search engines? When Alta Vista and it’s ilk were the reigning champs? The focus in the mid-1990’s world of search engines was on building a complete catalog of information on the web, and on speed of retrieval. Using those early search engines was unbelievably frustrating. They would return thousands of results, but then it was up to you to search those results for the particular nugget of information you needed.
For a decade, communications companies have been working to hyper-connect us in myriads of ways. Take me, for instance. I have five email addresses, four telephone numbers, three IM identities, and a host of VoIP names. Multiply that across the 2300 or so names in my address book, and it quickly becomes an unmanageable problem to reach me, or for me to answer all the people who want to reach me.
This is just like the search engine problem of the 1990’s. Google came along and solved that problem. Google built an algorithm to filter, rank, and prioritize results based on relevance. They called that algorithm "page rank", and it quickly differentiated Google from every other search engine. Google could, most of the time, produce a better result.
What if we could use relevance as a tool to filter, rank, and prioritize communications? It’s an interesting problem, because fundamentally the algorithm used by Google ("do other people think this page is relevant to this search term?") doesn’t work as well in communications. For the recipient of a telephone call, the relevance of that call is a highly personal affair based on the recipients current activity, location, relationship to the caller, mood, the stated importance of the call, and a variety of other criteria.
What would the Google of Communication be like?
August 18th, 2005 at 3:19 pm
So I’m working away and I get this popup. Damn RSS reader. Make that 70 million interruptions per day. Good thing I have nothing better to do.
August 19th, 2005 at 7:08 am
I do like the notion of self-training. I am reluctant to go through hundreds/thousands? of directories of incoming dids, email address and IM handles in order to give them priorty tags and business rules. Perhaps such a tool would watch my behavior and train itself…or perhaps I tag it after such an interuption…
I would appreciate complete ubiquity as well – at home, at work…at the cottage it keeps watching/learning and trying to consistently reassign priorities. With some luck, the bank of whoever will simply stop calling me….
’slong
August 22nd, 2005 at 9:13 am
What would the Google of Communication be like?
The Google of Communication would first need active participation from the service (telecom+internet) providers to share client data for tagging every node of use. A feedback based approach would be required. The next step would be to have a self training system which can constantly rank the source node based on collective responses and the degree of relativity between the nodes in case of failure(reported as spam) and thereby blacklist the source node if the failure exceeds a threshold. In addition the source can have the provision of modes viz, personal, business, marketing,..This way we will be able to rank our contacts and respond to them better by customising our receiver profile.
Or am i exposed too much to science fiction? : ))
August 22nd, 2005 at 3:13 pm
Bingo!
August 23rd, 2005 at 12:21 pm
[...] Business 2.0 has a nifty page of VC’s looking for teams to build products. This one caught my eye. Shanda Bahles of El Dorado Ventures is looking for a team to build customer service applications with VoIP. The application she describes is a perfect one for relevance enabled communication. Thanks to Andy on VoIPWatch for the pointer. [...]