What's Next: Beyond Facebook

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Meanwhile, Visible Path, a Foster City, California-based company, has released a beta version of its e-mail-tracking tool on its website. Like eTelemetry, Visible Path doesn't examine the content of messages; it only notes who sends messages to whom, when they send them, and how frequently. But the company claims it can use this information to derive reliable insights into whether someone has a close working relationship with a contact versus a cursory one. And Illumio, a new product from Tacit Software that is available to individuals for free, pores over the information on the PCs of everyone on a network--it relies on the data indexed by Google's (NASDAQ:GOOG) and Microsoft's desktop search tools--to identify the people most likely to be able to answer a particular question.

Of course, identifying the right person to talk to is only part of the problem, notes Aptima's Serfaty. In addition to being knowledgeable, a good collaborator is someone who's not currently bogged down in other tasks, is willing to be helpful, and works well with people like you. That's why Aptima's tools are being designed to take into account not just the depth of knowledge and experience of the people in the network but also their workload and workstyle. Serfaty's team, which is working with MIT's Media Lab, is even investigating how the system might recognize the ways in which external events can alter connections--as, for example, the way a suicide bombing in the Middle East can affect political, cultural, and religious alliances. In a business context, that might mean recognizing that a big jump in the price of steel strengthens potential ties between small manufacturing companies and plastics distributors. It sounds compelling, but don't reach for your checkbook just yet. Aptima's systems are still in the experimental stage; when they are available, they'll be aimed at government agencies and large companies. Should they prove successful, systems for smaller companies and consumer markets will follow.

Needless to say, monitoring e-mail and other communications poses privacy issues. But as I've argued in this column before, if you give people a benefit in return for giving up some of their online privacy, most will go along with it. In the case of Aptima and eTelemetry, the goal is to get entire organizations to install the software; that will take care of privacy considerations because, in general, companies have the right to subject employees to communications monitoring. That would allow the broad mapping of relationships throughout those organizations and between any organizations that agree to pool their networks.

The drawback is that people outside these organizations won't be able take advantage of the tools, and it's often the case that the person who has the solution to your problem isn't in your company. Visible Path, which has made its software available to the public, hopes to create a mass cross-organization network, but only if it can get enough individuals to sign up to have their e-mail tracked. On the other hand, there's nothing to stop Aptima and eTelemetry from eventually opening up their tools to the public, perhaps by cutting deals with a Web giant such as Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO); both companies say that's a possibility. And Visible Path, which has teamed up with business information provider Hoover's (NYSE:DNB), is eager to sign up entire companies as well as individuals.

But even intelligent social-networking tools, no matter how smart they get, will sometimes fail to get a handle on who can solve whose problems. That's because despite all the emphasis we tend to place these days on online activity, many of the most effective people still get a lot of their work done the old-fashioned way, that is, via phone calls or by dragging their butts over to someone's office for a talk, and the substance and even existence of those conversations can't easily be captured. And no matter how capable and all-knowing these systems get, you'll still stumble on the occasional great contact at a cocktail party or trade show or on an airplane flight. Technology can do wonders, but there's no complete replacement for the miracles accomplished every day through plain dumb luck.

Contributing editor David H. Freedman (whatsnext@inc.com) is a Boston-based author of several books about business and technology.

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