Concept in progress for a social management program.

The gist: A social network management program that would allow one to track activities/conversations with all contacts, and tag contacts with interests or other relevant data. Could be used to manage friends or business contacts.

Why

The busier we get and the more contacts we have in our network, the harder they become to manage. Friends whom we don't see all the time can be forgotten. Networking contacts that could prove valuable might be lost if not maintained in the least. By taking a few seconds to log our interations, we will not lose track of anybody, and not risk neglecting friends and aquaintances.

(optional) By also adding meta-data to each contact, you could search by interests, keep track of birthdays or other personal info, etc. So if you want to organize a volleyball game, you could search for all the contacts with the 'volleyball' tag.

Contacts

User should be able to import contact data from a variety of sources. Address book, Outlook/Entourage, yahoo/hotmail/gmail, etc. Ideally, Program would integrate well with these other options.

Event Tracking

After a conversation/activity/email/etc, User can open program and create an entry, which would include the contacts involved, the type of activity (this could be as general or specific as you wish; activity could be "phone conversation", "email", "hang out", or "date", for example), and the date on which this occured.

Reporting

Graph trends - see whom you've been spending time with; whom you've been neglecting.

Charting - last.fm style charts to view your most active contacts.

Alerts

If you wish to not lose touch with your contacts for more than X days, set Program to remind you. Different classes of contacts could have different settings, or settings per contact, and X would be adjustable in your Preferences. (e.g. If 'Mum' is set to 60 days, and you haven't even emailed her, you'll start getting reminders after 59 days. Yes, I see the irony in nagging yourself to call Mum.)