I need an app to help me build a stronger network.

August 30, 2011 1:51 PM

Looking for a network building/maintaining tool. Is there some sort of app (mac or web based) that will allow me to track how long it has been since talking to someone? Ideally I'd like to see one page with a horizontal bar graph with the number of days since last contact on the x-axis. So as the time between talking grows, the bar expands outwards.

I'm trying to become less introverted and build a better network, but I often forget how long it's been since I last had talked to people. I think that a visual reminder would help me keep in touch. Has anyone seen something like this?

posted by Homo economicus to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

This is a really custom piece of software you're describing. There's a couple approaches I can think of towards programming it, but in any event you're not going to find this capability in any off-the-shelf software. You'd be best off finding someone who can program & induce (through money or favors) them to write it up for you. It wouldn't be terribly complex; just a graphing library, a widget library for the buttons & forms & some simple conditional loops to tie them together. But it's not something anybody's ever done before, or at least not released to the world at large.
posted by scalefree at 3:41 PM on August 30, 2011

Just another thought, you could probably even do it with Excel. It all depends on how you want it rigged. If you want the software to automatically update when you send an email or FB update, that'd be much more difficult. But if you don't mind manually clicking a button when you've contacted your friend to reset the bar, that'd be really quite easy to whip up. If you don't have any programmer friends there's plenty of sites that connect programmers with people who need programs to be written. Like I said there's lots of libraries to take care of the heavy lifting with graphing & all the button & input stuff, the logic of the program itself is beginner stuff. It shouldn't take much effort at all to crank it out. I could be wrong but I just don't think you'll find a program already written that was built for this purpose.
posted by scalefree at 7:09 PM on August 30, 2011

I'm not sure this is quite such a custom idea as scalefree suggests. You want to look up 'customer relationship management' software (or 'contact management').
posted by jacalata at 7:16 PM on August 30, 2011 [1 favorite]

Yeah I think you want to log all of your contacts into one of the now 30,000 CRMs out there.
posted by DarlingBri at 9:45 PM on August 30, 2011