Relationships -- it's CRM's middle name. Yep, it's all about the relationships. And now you can compare the size of yours with your friends.
Taking Kevin Bacon one better, a Salt Lake City-based company named 7 Degrees is offering PeopleMaps [1], an app which they claim will show people "how they are connected" to any person or company. It comes in free and "Professional" editions.
As industry observer Stephen Arnold [2] correctly notes, this is nothing new -- "Companies like i2 [3], Megaputer [4], and other vendors offer these types of systems," except for the fact that People Maps [5] integrates with Salesforce.com [6].
CustomerThink's Dear Leader Bob Thompson's done a good review [7] of the product, noting that he's only "two contacts away" from President Barack Obama, putting this reporter three contacts away.
Sour note: When CRM Tool Academy tried to test-drive the free edition, we got an error screen saying "We have detected you have not met the minimum requirements. Currently only Firefox versions 2 and 3 and IE versions 6, 7 and 8 are supported."
What, Chrome isn't good enough for you? Well excuuuuuuuse me. Tell you what, PeopleMaps: Get back to us when you've joined the 21st century.
The tool's "deep mapping technology" is billed as giving an "intuitive, visual representation" of "relevant" relationships from such sources as Outlook, LinkedIn, Facebook, Gmail and Yahoo. There are also options to include Internet and "premium data" sources.
It's touted by company officials as showing your "connection paths" to people or companies, and if you cough up for the premium edition, your sales prospects are analyzed and ranked "based on the strength of personal and professional connections."
As we dirty shirt, mouth-breathing Chrome plebes aren't good enough for PeopleMaps, here's a screen shot from tech consultant Adam DesAutels [8], who described it as "very glitchy," while noting "I do like having all of my contacts in one place though."
Doesn't like Chrome. Hmpf.