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IntroNetworks Adds Visibility To Social Networks

It was hard to tell if there were more social network platforms at O'Reilly's ETech/Graphing Social Patterns (GSP) than there were companies looking to fund them. The parade of ideas gets a little bit weary, the eyes blur when trying to distinguish between one or the other, the amount of data required by each is a bit staggering, and it's often hard to tell a friend from an acquaintance, a widget from an midlet (if you combined them would they be a midget?), a twitter from a clatter. So here's another: IntroNetworks.

No, it doesn't have a crazy name, in fact it's frighteningly straightforward. Use introNetworks and the data it collects helps match you up with others that may be a fit, depending on what you're looking for (a mentor, a collaborator, people who share things in common). More than that, it represents this data visually.

IntroNetworks calls it "smart," but based on populated information, along with tags and attributes that the community participants enter, it pulls the data together and shows it visually, allowing for a quicker assessment of that data.

Some of the potential applications: Finding a mentor internally within a corporation; the ability to connect with not only people, but with products, books, other articles (as if you read anything else but this).

Right now, introNetworks is building the ability to match veterans returning from Iraq; match them with their families, with other veterans, or even help them find jobs.

One of the challenges is this information already is entered in other places. Kymberlee Weil, the company's president, says that the technology will be able to take data from many places (like LinkedIn and Facebook), but users still have to enter tags that are specific to the functions assigned; these rich tags aren't available in Facebook and MySpace, according to Weil.

The reporting capabilities provide a wealth of data, from understanding who the top messangers are to finding out what top messengers are saying. The new version released this week was built on Adobe's Flex 3 platform, and allowed the company to build a much cleaner user interface and makes components out of some of the features.

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