Reaching the right people

Posted: February 17th, 2010 | Author: Alex | Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, email, Search, Twitter | No Comments »

Imagine this situation: A company has hundreds (maybe thousands) of employees. All of them have their own skills and areas of expertise. There is probably lots of overlap, however any one person will not know everyone in the larger group who has particular skill sets. It someone is working on a project and needs assistance to overcome some technical hurdle, it could be very helpful, if they could communicate with those people who also have experience in that area. Those people might be located in entirely different parts of the company.

Semantic email addressing [PDF] aims to solve this problem:

Email addresses are a means to an end. The goal is usually not to send an email to a particular address, but to a particular person. You want to say hello to your friend Steve or send a message to the VP of marketing at Microsoft or to the head caterer for your wedding. Ideally, you could send a message to a person just by entering his or her name, position, or some other descriptive attribute. If a person’s email address changes, the email system should send to the new address automatically. If the person matching a description differs over time, the email system should send to the person currently matching that description.

In the given example, the user would be able to get answers to his or her questions by reaching out to the people with the fitting skill sets without previously having known those people: The email system can decide, who the most appropriate receivers of the messages are.

I cannot help thinking that Aardvark was at least a little inspired by the ideas behind semantic email addressing. Their process is simple: Users send in questions (using email, twitter, IM, etc.), Aarvark routes the question to another user is (hopefully) qualified to answer it and the user will eventually receive a response, often just a few minutes later. In this social search approach, Aardvark accomplishes the job of finding information by finding the right people who can provide it. The service has received very good press and was recently acquired by google.

Twitter seems like it might be a good platform for this problem area. If someone has a public twitter feed, they are essentially broadcasting their updates to the open stream and anyone can see them. It is probably safe to assume, they are at least open to the idea of talking to strangers/responding to messages from people they do not already know.

How could one go about finding the best people to message though? One method is certainly to search the message stream for specific keywords and basically manually look for people who might be active in areas of interest. You can also search in and add yourself to one of the many directories that are being developed.

But, if I simply need to talk to someone and ask them “May I ask you a question about XYZ?” then clearly, a) broadcasting my question hoping that someone will answer could be very inefficient and b) first researching who the best person might be for my question(s) puts all the burden on me.

What if the user could simply send out the question and the system would ensure that the most appropriate people see it?

The basic idea here is this: The user submits the question (along with a set of keywords) to his or her software. The software has analyzed other users’ message streams, extracted keywords, etc. and generated a knowledge base. If the query can be confidently matched to another user, a message is generated and send to that user. The message will be visible to that user as a regular name mention and they can choose whether to engage in that conversation.

Some of the obvious challenges:

• Generating of meaningful keywords/subject areas based on a person’s message stream.
• Successful matching of queries with users.
• Establishing an effective communication protocol that does not easily lend itself to abuse, i.e. spam.

A lot of web-based social networks are great at helping you connect with people you already know. Twitter makes it easy to connect with new people. The outlined approach (or a variation thereof) might be a good way of further supporting creation of those new connections, based on areas of interest.

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