In a New York Times Op-Ed last December, Tim O’Reilly fantasized:
Imagine, for a moment, that Verizon were to think like Google or Amazon. It could give you access to your entire call history, every phone call you have sent or received, not just your last 10 phone calls. It might build an address book for you based on everyone you had ever talked to, with top results for the numbers you call most often.
And what if this phone company opened up its databases to developers of software applications? We could soon see mash-ups of your call history with the address books from your personal computer, your telephone and your social network. Now imagine a user community turned loose to annotate that data.
Little did O’Reilly know when he wrote this that a then-stealth startup called Skydeck was figuring out a way to do just that. Skydeck launched in private beta last March with a very basic service that marries your address book to your cell phone bill so you can see your real social network based on who you call the most. Up until now, people in the private beta could see their cell phone social network, but that was it. They couldn’t connect with anyone else using the service.
But starting today, members can opt in to connect their social networks with other friends who are also using Skydeck. What makes this interesting is that they can see the strength of their connections to each friend, as well as how strongly connected their friends are to other people. Skydeck measures the strength of a relationship based on the frequency and volume of calls between two people, how recent the calls were, and whether the calls were reciprocal or one-sided. Skydeck rolls up all of this data and represents the overall strength of a relationship as rising signal bars.
Now, there aren’t that many people using Skydeck yet because it is still in a closed beta. (We have 700 more invites for readers who apply here and mention “TechCrunch.”) But that’s not stopping Skydeck CEO Jason Devitt from opening up APIs to the Skydeck service so that other Web developers can tap into this new source of social data.
Exactly what kinds of apps will Skydeck’s APIs make possible? I asked Devitt, and he came up with the following, which are not half-bad (all are hypothetical, but technically possible):
Top 10 Apps That Could Be Built With the Skydeck APIs (my title)
1. You could write a plugin for Outlook or use Gmail’s API to display the last time you spoke to someone [on the phone] when you bring up an email from them.
2. Or you could go further and create an app showing in one place the history of your email, IM, Skype, and cell phone conversations with all your contacts (the cell phone is the missing piece - all the other data is already accessible).
3. You could write an app displaying every call longer than one minute in iCal at the date and time it took place, so that [a record of] all your calls appear in the same place as your in-person meetings.
4. 37Signals could add a note to the Highrise page for every call you make to a contact tagged “Business” in Skydeck.
5. RescueTime could display all the hours you spend on the phone alongside the applications you use and the web sites you visit.
6. FreshBooks could break out calls with clients on invoices for their customers.
7. LinkedIn could use ranking data to show which of the five people that we both know is best placed to introduce you to me.
8. You could write an app to bring all this data back to your smartphone. We will target some phones ourselves, but we can’t address every platform and we won’t stop anyone from trying.
9. You could write an app showing which of your Facebook friends you text [or call] most often. (You’d have to match on name because Facebook doesn’t disclose email addresses etc., but that’s not so hard.) Or use our measure of reciprocity to poke the friends that never call you back.
10. You could throttle tweets to your cell phone based on how many text messages you have left in your plan. (We track how many minutes and text messages you have left each day).
Integration with Salesforce is another obvious one. What apps would you build, or want to use, that ties into your cell-phone social network?
http://skydeck.com/apply—-This link is not working…
watching the mind become supported by technology is an amazing high, lovely article
Hey. the link to sign up is dead. even on their web site, clicking on Get SkyDeck leads to nowhere. not a good start
yeap, the link for apply isn’t working
All they had to do was to make a deal with the Israeli company that processes 90% of all US phone bills. They already track who you know and who is in your extended network. Since the computer that actually processes your phone bill is not even in US, they are immune from any privacy law issues. Welcome to the foreign-based big brother!
Next step is to work on my grocery store. I want all my club member data.
please visit the site: http://www.newsendorser.com
upload videos and invite friends. your help means a lot!!! thank you
We see the problem on the apply link and we’re working on it right now.
This sounds a lot like my-girlfriend-totally-busted me or my-wife-got-custody-of-the-kids technology than anything convenient. I don’t know how I wouldn’t already have a feel for this data, being the one on the phone, but maybe somebody would enjoy stats for stats’s sake.
Maybe number 6 would make sense for work, but beyond that, I wonder what actual information that you can act on this would give you.
Not a bad idea, I just think Tim O’Reilly’s ‘Imagine if’ scenarios sound scary, not helpful.
mmm yummy. lemme get dat api.
The URL to apply the invite code: http://skydeck.com/apply/ (Works!!) ! @Erick, fix the link please
!!
Cheers!
Morgan –
I’m curious as to why those scenarios sound scary. Seems much less scary to have people building private address books for me with my actual social graph data than to have to try to rebuild it in public with one of the existing social network sites, which have much less control over privacy, even if they care about it, because their whole system depends on the explicit.
As to this just being stats, I suppose Google is just stats too
People think that statistics mean display of statistics but in fact they mean application of statistics. You’re imagining that google = google trends, and saying, “no big deal.”
But if you really had a social graph address book, you could keep much better track of people you care about, and this would be an incredible starting point for adding on all the social network functionality that people are so excited about in Facebook et al, but with your real social graph.
P.S. Erick, re your “little did he know” trope — I met with Skydeck in January to push the idea forward. I wasn’t fantasizing, I was “programming via the lazyweb,” telling folks about work that needed to be done. Lots of other companies are also now exploring this idea, though Skydeck is far and away the furthest along.
The link is working now, we apologize for that.
@9 Morgan,
If all you could see in your email were the last 10 messages that you had sent or received, would you have a feel for the missing data? Seeing your calls this way makes your phone a lot more useful. You remember important calls that you never followed up on, you realize who you’ve been neglecting, and you see who never calls you back.
As Tim points out, there are many more applications for your true social graph. We love Facebook and LinkedIn, but nobody has 200 equally important friends. And I don’t want to categorize all my friends and colleagues by hand, checking boxes to say which ones are important to me this month and which ones are not.
Thanks
Jason
My closest friends I speak to in person, and shoot endless amounts of text messages to them during the week.
I’d want to see my SMS social network, before I see my phone call network.
@15 Steve,
Skydeck shows both calls and SMS.
Thanks
Jason
If this ever gets even the slightest bit popular vonage will release an API and so will Skype then you can kiss this goodbye.
We have already been using this language.. ‘real social network’ in describing our vision, and are glad to see it echoed. Your phone number and call history tell a better story about the real world connections you care about, so tools that serve THIS network will certainly have value beyond the virtual friends we make online but rarely meet.
Our application, that allows you to consume radio and podcasts on your phone, talkback to the hosts and share audio clips via CelleGrams, would indeed be a good hookup with Skydeck, and we look forward to talking.
As far as Skydeck being unique, zyb.com has been out there and doing well along much of the same lines, making the address book accessible to their social network database. They also use the term ‘real social network’ in their pitch.
Another good use would be to monitor calls and tag them as spam. Like most of the the email applications do.
Why do I need a service to tell me about my friend “strength”? I know who is important to me: the people I call are generally v. good friends & family. The people who are part of my Facebook network, well, they are just a jumble of two hundred-odd people I’ve met over the years in high school, college, graduate school, and my industry. In fact, some of the people who are in my Facebook network are ones I’d actively avoid seeing in person or talking to on the phone, but don’t mind them hanging about my social network online.
A “range” paradigm doesn’t make sense for human relationships, at least not to me. You’re either good friends/family with someone, or they are part of the enormous cloud of acquaintances you gather as you age.
Maybe this service could fly as a feature of a Quicken-like product to track how much time professional services spend on client calls, but aside from that, I struggle to see much value here.
So where do they get this data? The carriers/providers directly? I’m too lazy to investigate further (actually, I need to get back to developing).
Harry “pretty busy lately” Wang
I have been using the service since it was first written about on here. I am happy with their FF Add-On, as it lets me constantly know how many minutes I have left, but website/data import still needs to be fixed. I am still displaying numerous pages of calls from 12/31/08. It stops me from actually using the service for any thing because of this little bug. And yes I have written them about the bug.
@19 Dilip, that’s on our list.
@20 Jane, there’s a lot of research into the idea of the ’strength’ of a connection in a social network, going back over 40 years, with applications in areas from national security to healthcare. Here’s a simple example. Recently I was looking for an introduction to someone on LinkedIn. The site told me that there were 73 people I knew who knew someone who knew the person that I wanted to meet. So which one of the 73 people do I ask? That’s when I need to know which connections are strong and which are not.
Hey Jason, Tim,
Reading through the article and the comments I have to say that by in large, the idea here for Skydeck is very clever, but mostly useless. Please hear me out and don’t get offended or if you do, don’t get defensive. I do think the idea is very good, but it just doesn’t serve any meaningful purpose.
Before I begin, I have some experience in social networks, have read just about everything one can read about them and am in the process of building a business social network. One of the problems with Facebook and more importantly to me, LinkedIn is that there really isn’t anything to do at these sites. They are called social/business networks, but very little networking or for that matter socializing goes on. The concepts are great, but other than messaging, some multimedia and marginal networking, there isn’t much to do.
If you spend any amount of time playing video games then you most certainly have heard of Grand Theft Auto 4. Play it and what you will find is an absolutely beautiful game with an amazing world, but, nothing to do. Having a great idea is great, but turning that idea into something functional is the hard part.
You need to give your website a function, something more clever than a Google Analytics. When I first started using Analytics I thought it was a great statistics program, and would check it every day. But thats all it really is and it doesn’t get checked as much.
So far all I can see from the description above and the comments following it, is that your website is a great platform for organizing and representing your cellphone usage. The statistics side of it might be useful enough in itself if you have users that regularly talk to 15 or more people. Most people really only keep in touch, on a regular (1 month) basis with no more than 5 people. But even if we assume 15, even that is easy enough for people to keep a mental count of who they call more often than not.
Beyond that, there is the option to connect “calling/texting” networks. The idea is great, but to what end. Truth is, I already know the people that my friends know. And if I dont, then I don’t need to.
Where I think your idea can have a very strong benefit is in the LinkedIn and Twitter world. Having the option to see the “Business” only contacts of a friend for example. Or of a business friend of a friend is great. Having the ability to trace forward to a company through friends, or backwards from a company to a friend is great. Keeping things strictly business would be awesome. And being able for me to see how strong the relationships is between two people is great too.
The Twitter thing could be great as a mobile twitter. You can select, out of all your friends, who you want to receive a Mobile Twit (Text) from. A Mwit, or something equally unoriginal. =) This would work great considering that most cell companies now offer unlimited texting. It would be very useful to have you for example go through your list of contact and select who you want to receive a Mwit from. Whenever that persons publishes on Twitter, you get a text of whatever they Twitted about.
Still, I think you should focus more on what your service does rather than how it does it. I think its great that you opened up your API to developers, but that in some sense shows that you really have no idea what the function of your site is. It feels like a great idea that is just that, an idea. I have to agree with Morgan on this.
Someday I won’t be sitting here on my laptop I’ll be on my phone all day everyday and work production will decline and we’ll all be at a loss. Phones are going to be crazy in 5 years.
“Reading through the article and the comments I have to say that by in large, the idea here for Skydeck is very clever, but mostly useless.”
I agree, and I run a social network. People are naturally skeptical. If they see what they consider private data out of context it could easily give them the creepy feeling.
The generation today is the type to ask why they would be able to see their private data in X context online and be creeped out about it.
Another approach has already been in place for several years now. With CRMs like salesforce, surgarcrm and vtiger integrating with open source PBXs like Asterisk. Asterisk can manage inbound/outboound calls and can forward to cell phone as an extension (something like GrandCentral). The CRM keeps track of the type of utlization (phone bill) the user has and graphs the data. No one yet has taken that mysql data and sent it free to the cloud for good reason: When it comes to socials like facebook, I volunteer my info in hopes of a relationship so I’m not sure I can buy into my private phone calls building that relationship for me.
i’m in !!
@24 and @26
I won’t take offense at “mostly useless”. It makes me think of “mostly harmless”, which was all the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy had to say about Earth.
Fyurien, if you try Skydeck you’ll see that it is not an analytics package and we’re already doing some of the things that you suggest. And releasing an API is not an indication that we don’t know what to do; it’s a sign that there are many more things people want us to do than we can ever do by ourselves. Three different companies requested it.
That said, there’s a reason that we’re still in a private, invitation-only beta, and inviting TechCrunch readers to give us feedback. There’s lots more to come.
Jason
Erick, you should mention that it works for SMS too. Had to find that in the comments.
Can’t wait to use this.
If Verizon were to think like Google or Amazon all Verizon customers would be given the option to opt-in to an enormous ridesharing network. Think of it - because of GPS/cellphone tower information, Verizon knows where I drive, when I drive there, and how often. So when I left my Houston hotel a couple of years ago and my rental car had a flat, all I would need to do would be flip open my phone, open the ridesharing app, and speak the address of my destination (The phone knows where I am). Instantly, other Verizon subscribers who also opted in, and who meet my ridesharing criteria (positive ratings from other ridesharers, listen to the same music, non-smoking, etc.) would be presented on my phone, and I would select a ride from one of them. It could be used for regular commuting or ad-hoc trips. Numerous companies are trying this without the enormous benefits of the large network and trip/gps/location information of Verizon. Readysetgoose (http://www.readysetgoose.com) is already on mobile phones and is using text messages, but they are charging employers. Goloco.org and Pickuppal.com charge the riders and take a cut. NuRide (http://www.nuride.com) is free, rewards the driver and rider with gift certificates/discounts, and solves the “ride with an Ax murderer” problem with eBay like ratings, women can choose to ride with only other women, etc., but is only in areas where they can get sponsors to supply rewards and/or government contracts to reduce traffic. (Full disclosure - I used to work at NuRide.)
Benefit to consumer - a social network that actually solves a real problem - helps me get where I need to go, helps me save on gas, lowers my insurance costs (I drive less), and I get to work faster (less traffic/use hov.)
Benefit to Society - reduced traffic
Benefit to Planet - reduced global warming - 30% of CO2 is from vehicles.
Benefit to Verizon - reduced churn/increased loyalty - if I left Verizon, I wouldn’t have access to all the trips/riders/drivers in the Verizon network! OK, I’ll get off my soap box.
This definitely has potential to support your real social network instead of the ‘everyone I exchanged and E-mail with is a friend’ types we build on facbook etc.
Still am wondering… what are your competitive differentiators from zyb.com?
Whether or not there are many, we look forward with working with your API cross-promoting with you as we add more content partners.
Anyone else totally bored with all this social network stuff? Enough already.
@33 Andrew, Zyb backs up your address book and allows you to share media with people in that address book, just like Plaxo and their service Pulse. All connections are equal, so you keep getting news and invitations from people that you barely know.
Skydeck helps you keep track of who you actually call and text. We enable you to manage your call records the way that you manage your web mail. And we use that to organize your address book and your network around which of your contacts are important to you and which are not.
so the site wont work with IE and forces you to install a toolbar for Firefox (works only with Firefox 1.5+). Didnt we already go thru the pain and suffering of installing components, ActiveX controls, plugins for browsers in 90s and as a species decided that was retarded and voted in favor of Broswer-based/web 2.0/RIA type apps so we dont have to install crap on our computers anymore?
forces you to install skydeck toolbar and works only on firefox and not safari.
I dont like the colors(blue) and the font is too small.
Jason, I love integration #6! FreshBooks is game if you are.
It is a trivial integration. Poll the client contact info, mash up against your call logs, and create invoices with line items.
Check out our API at http://developers.freshbooks.com
I’ll give you a shout.
First of all congratulations to SkyDeck team. I think its a very clever idea. I will explain why
I recently had some spare time to think about ideas for a new web site and mobile social networking based on cell phone bills came into my mind. Now you know why I think its a clever idea. However I do not think its a great idea like facebook with open applications.
When I mentioned this idea to a close friend of mine, couple of days back, he said that data is too private for some and would take lot of trust. At first I thought he is totally wrong and on second thought he does have a valid point. The call record data is sensitive for lot of people and they wouldn’t feel comfortable an unknown web site parsing and analyzing the data. Once the site is well known and stands firm against all hacker attacks for an year, probably it creates secure feeling to the end-user. Its a chicken-egg problem.
I haven’t tried the skydeck service yet but the look and feel of the site is great. Nice colors and fonts. Very easy to find information. I would be interested to find where the username/password information will be stored. I am assuming the firefox tool bar stores this information. That would be scary. Atleast something I can’t use at work because I am the kind of that wouldn’t want my work browser to remember/store my passwords permanently.
I am a huge linux/firefox fan but for skydeck to click it has to work with IE very soon.
If I change my phone number and someone else gets my old number, how would this service work for me and for the new person who got my old number.
Good luck.
No support for IE?!? Wow, first time I’ve ever seen that. Now I know what it must feel like for all of you Opera and Safari users out there. Pretty frustrating.
We’re tackling a similar problem at Fonolo with our “Intelligent Call History” feature. Except that we are focusing a particular segment of call only: the calls you make to businesses.
The way we see it, you don’t really need a history of the 30 times you called your buddy this month. But a history of calls with your bank, airline, etc, could come in very handy. Especially if when you combine that with access to call recordings.
http://www.fonolo.com
@38 Sunir, there’s no better place to do a deal than in the comments thread on TechCrunch
@36 and @39: For some people, the Firefox toolbar is the best part of the service - it shows the balance of your voice minutes and text messages each day so that you don’t have to check yourself. For others, they like knowing that their username and password are stored in the browser and never go to Skydeck. Jagan, you don’t need the toolbar to use Skydeck, only to fetch your phone bill, so you could just install it on your home machine. But for you, for all the people who have been burned by rogue toolbars, and for all those poor souls like tchblg who just hate friction, we will offer a path without the toolbar soon.
It sounds ok. But I prefer to make friends with celebrities and millionaires at http://www.richromances.com. Here we can free chat, email and wink.It is too amazing!
support for IE
It all sounds great to me, especially for business intelligence use (how many times did i call those customers/providers this month? when was the last time I called them?). It sounds a bit familiar too… MinuteWatcher came up with something similar a couple of years ago (minus the social networking) and did not get much love from T-mobile (http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/7/prweb409909.htm).
Besides anybody knows what happened to that company? Their website seems to have expired.
I hope Skydeck is prepared for this kind of backlash…
As Kevin said, that would be great for business intelligence, and also to control your kids hehe.
The world’s awash in tech companies whose primary goal is not so much to provide a useful service and grow a business as it is to make a lot of money by being acquired. Few of these services have any real utility and I don’t expect this one to be any different. Too much ‘funny money’ chasing marginal concepts.
A few parting words…
I don’t normally check back on comments, but this time I wanted to. Great job answering the questions and addressing everyones concerns here Jason. Honestly, I half expected you to go Bill-O on everyone here, me included. Starting a new site and trying to promote a new idea is always hard, trust me I know. What makes it hard is getting fair and sometimes unfair criticisms. You did great and I honestly think that if you keep working on this idea, something very good can come out of it.
The one thing I found that has helped me in building the site I’m working on. Closed beta in about 2 months, wohooo!!! =) Is that I went and looked at “ALL” of the competitors in detail. I signed up for their service, I played with all their functions and clicked on just about every link I could. At first I would make lists of what I liked and didn’t, but after a while it was all mental notes. So, I would say go look at all the other sites mentioned here. There is nothing wrong with using a great idea (convention) from another site. You don’t necessarily need to make the next big thing, the next great thing is good enough.
Also, have you thought about how you plan on making money. Advertisement is not good enough. Trust me, look at Facebook and the ad spam they run. How the hell is that company worth 9B? Anyway, I was thinking about how you might make money and the idea I came up with is a shared revenue service. You can call it something like “Smart Connect” or hire someone to come up with something more interesting. The idea would be that calling information would be very useful to have. So why not charge for it. You don’t want to charge me or the regular consumer, but rather businesses. A company may be very interested to know who I call, how often and for how long. If you can identify people by profession, interests and so on, that calling information might have some value.
Of course you don’t want your users to feel like you are screwing them over by selling their call or relationship information, so this is where the revenue sharing comes in. Market it, as a way to pay for your cell phone bill or something and tell users they can make money if they opt in. So, Comapny A comes in and buys up the calling history of all 21-40 year old males, in southern California, that make 45K per year and are in the IT industry. For whatever reason. They pay a monthly charge per primary user and per contacts of the primary user. The cost per user is say $1, and $.10 per contact. Give the user the $1 and you keep the rest.
This would work much much better if you can give more pertinent information to the companies. Companies want to know people are, what they want and what will drive them to buy their stuff.
Anyway, just an idea.
Good luck and hope you have some serious success.
@48,
The idea of the new business model is interesting. But after a second thought it’s still not convincing. Note that all the calling info is just too personal and important to a consumer. Are you going to sell your friends and family’s contacts to a business you don’t know, just for a few dollars a month? Sharing revenue with consumer by compromising their personal data won’t work.
I think the business model is still the biggest issue of this idea. Maybe being acquired is the most possible solution.