PeopleMaps: Leveraging Those Followers and Friends

(MoneyWatch)  Preparing to interview one of the founders of a company called 7 Degrees, Inc., about their business app PeopleMaps, and testing out their product before hand, like always, I was surprised when the site's registration process prompted me to allow it to import all of my social networking and email contacts lists.

Suddenly, I felt that awful sensation in the pit of my stomach that usually is the sign that I'm about to repeat some awful mistake from my past, so I stopped dead in my tracks.

A moment later, I recovered the relevant bad memory.

An email message had arrived from a colleague working on a similar book project to one of mine, with the subject line "So-and-so has photographs for you."

Assuming this to be legit, I went through the required registration process, was prompted to allow the import of my email contacts, and (stupidly) did so.

This triggered a new email to everyone I knew with the subject line "David Weir has photographs for you."

This was the work of a viral social network scam called Tagged. It's viral, all right, just like the swine flu.

So before allowing 7 Degrees access to my personal data, I decided to ask co-founder Tim Sheehan what his company intended to do with it.

"We give this importing of personal data a lot of thought," he said. "We hate those services that take your data and do sneaky things like send out messages to your friends. So what we provide is purely an individual tool for you, or your team. When you go through our registration process, you determine which data will be kept private and for your use only. You also can safely share the data with your colleagues if you choose to do so."

The key word there would be "safely."

What the company then does is to combine this personal data with licensed proprietary databases from the likes of Thomson Reuters to map all of your potential relationships with other executives and companies throughout whatever industries you're interested in.

It issues a "connection score" along a scale of 0-100 for each of your contacts.

This seems particularly suited, for example, to someone like a VP, Sales, who could use it to assigns leads to the sales force, based on who has the "warmest" contact at a target company. Sheehan says PeopleMaps is embedded with market leader Salesforce.com and soon will be with many other CRM services as well.

Navigating these maps of names, represented as bubbles, seemed intuitive and logical enough. The technology was pretty good at quickly determining the top ten "warmest" connections I would have with any various target organizations.

Sheehan says the service relies on the "most powerful graphing technology out there," which the company obtained via an acquisition soon after launching two years back.

"This is really for people who have a critical need to leverage their networks, which is most pressing for those in sales or recruiting. Who you know in business has always been important, of course. When we launched the company, we noticed that relationships were becoming more digital via social networks and that those digital relationships were going into a few main silos."

The company's business model is simple. You can try a limited edition for free, but the premium edition, which is what the serious operator will want, costs $49 per person per month.

After talking this all over with Sheehan and seeing his product in action, I felt reassured that this is a company that not only talks the talk but walks the walk in keeping your private data "safe." So that's one less thing I have to worry about when I go to sleep tonight, I guess.

Then, in passing, he mentioned that the U.S. government's intelligence agencies use this same software for tracking terrorist organizations, and I immediately started imagining, way back in the day, a younger and more trusting Osama bin-Laden allowing some subordinate to import all of his contacts into some database somewhere from a cave in Tora Bora or whatever.

Paranoid delusions. Hard to shake in an age when interlocking databases seem to be cropping up everywhere we turn.