As the size of our social networks grow (meaning we connect with more people) it's important that the tools we use make it simple to interact with the right people at the right time. (context matters!) I've found that some collaboration platforms do this well, while others do not.
Here is a good example from Yammer. Notice when I type "@k" it first suggests Kevin Young, he is not the only person in my network who's name starts with K, but he is person I interact with most frequently. The next two suggestions are based on last name's starting with K. Notice "Ku" is listed before "Ke", that's because I interact with Ganesh more often in Yammer than Brent.
Google+ takes this a step further, not just focusing on the names of the people you interact with most often, but prioritising names of people from the specific conversation. In the example below I've typed "@j", and even though "Je" comes before "Jo" and "Joa" would come before "Joh", notice "John Tropea" is the name that is first suggested. That is because John has already been active in this specific conversation.
Compare that to how poorly Facebook manages @mentions. In the example below I've typed "@chr" and it brings up 3 of my friends named Chris, none of which have been part of this conversation. Yet "Chris Crummey" has been but his name is not displayed. #Fail
Today most people use type-ahead to mention people, but some platforms are starting to make more object types accessible. For example, both Jive and Confluence do a good job of allowing people to type-ahead to link to pages.
So while social networks are not yet physic, they are getting better at making intelligent predictions, suggestions and recommendations. I have lots of ideas for how they can still be vastly improved and am enjoying working with software vendors on this.
What are your favourite examples of products that do this really well or really poorly?
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