Spoke, one of the social network software startup companies, just received a grant from the National Science Foundation to work on problems of data quality in customer relationship management (CRM) systems. I know this because a reader of this blog, Auren Hoffman, prodded me to take a new look at Spoke. (When I first went to the site some months ago, there wasn’t much happening. Now, they have opened a public interface, so that you can sign up and find and invite contacts, as LinkedIn does.

Spoke surprised me in a couple of ways. First, it not only read in all of my contacts, but it also mined all of my Outlook email folders to find all the people who had ever sent me mail, or cc’d me on mail. So my resulting personal network consisted of over 6,000 people, many of whom I only dimly remembered from past corporate jobs or didn’t know at all. It will take some time to prune all these names out. But Spoke also “recognizes” that these people are really weak ties, and it shows me that with a little bar next to each name how strong the tie is (based on frequency of emails from a person that it found and whether I was a “To” or a “cc”).

It also provides a delightful visual view of the contacts and the proximity of one to another. However, since only 7 of the contacts in my network are actually registered in Spoke, there’s nothing very interesting in terms of a network map.

Having already invested some of my social capital six months ago by inviting many colleagues into LinkedIn, I have to find something really valuable and different in Spoke to build the network connections there. So it’s a conundrum. Most of my colleagues haven’t seen much value in participating in LinkedIn, so I have to pass for now on re-building the network in Spoke. (Especially since the system tray isn’t working.)