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There has been a ton of buzz about Google’s coup to get all social networking development to use their API set. And for good reason. The social graph is really interesting information, and likely to be the next frontier for the Internet to capitalize on. While Facebook won’t change the world, having social relationships in computer readable form has amazing potential along a lot of fronts. Marketers are drooling over it so they can sell to your friends, activists want to know what powerful people you know, and fund raisers want you to bring your friends with checkbook in hand.

We’ve been thinking about how to leverage the social graph in Salesforce.com. Salesforce.com is interested as well–if the platform can’t roll with the latest ideas in marketing and outreach, users will scratch that itch in some other way. And you can see Adam Gross at the Open Social launch party introducing a demo of Friends pulled from Salesforce.com.

But wait a minute, what are friends in Salesforce.com? And that brings up a glaring weakness in Salesforce.com when you think about the social graph:

In Salesforce.com today there is no standard way to connect people as friends.

Sure, you can create a custom object to track person-to-person relationships. But yours will be different from everyone else’s, because they had to invent their own, too. And they have

When Salesforce.com users want to play in the Open Social space, one hurdle they’ll have to clear is writing their definition of “friendship” into their Open Social implementation. Bummer.

But what if Salesforce.com added a Person-to-Person relationship object? They have ways to to Organization-to-Organization relationships, and Organization-to-Contact relationships. Why not a new one? Adding things to the code base is a heck of a lot easier than changing what’s already there.

I would love to see this new standard object (you can vote for it on Ideas). Relate two People together with a description of the relationship, and a start and end date. Allow me to create custom fields on the relationship so I can be as detailed as I want. Then write an Open Social reference implementation that leverages that object.

Salesforce.com, I’d be happy to do any kind of beta testing of such an object. You’ve got my number!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 21st, 2007 at 12:37 pm and is filed under CRM, Technology. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.