Networking: How do you manage your network and stay in touch with your key contacts?

[jamiequint]

[danw]

I'd quite like something like this for my mobile http://people.interaction-ivrea.it/s.blyth/mysocialfabric/design.html

As for answering the actual question, everything is done on my mobile phone, business cards and facebook. Everyone I know well (close friends, housemates etc) are on my mobile. All my aquaintances from university I keep touch with on facebook. Facebook reminds me of birthdays and tells me what their up to in my news feed. Finally I keep all my business contacts in piles of business cards on my desk. One pile for archive, one for people I need to contact soon and one for people I'm awaiting response from. I can even easily tag people by writing metadata on the back of the card.

[jamiequint → danw]

The mysocialfabric idea is interesting, the only problem I see with it is that there is a significant barrier towards adding somebody as a contact (you have to configure an avatar for them - what if you have never met them in person and don't know what they look like?) and I don't see how it scales (what does the screen look like when you have 200 contacts) especially on a mobile. Thanks for the answer, thats an interesting way to do it.

[jamiequint]

Networking is a vital part of being successful in the business world, connections and human capital can be just as important as cash and intellectual capital. What tools (e.g. email, notebook, post its) do you use to manage your interactions with people, and how do you use this information to further develop your relationships?

[hwork]

37Signals' Highrise -- not out yet -- could prove to be a good way of doing it. I can say that I'm certainly excited. Check out the preview post here:

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/265-preview-1-an-introduction-to-highrise-the-product-previously-known-as-sunrise

[jamiequint → hwork]

yeah I've been following that, the reason I asked this question is I've been working on a product since November that is doing something similar (I was hoping that 37 Signals' product was going to be more CRM-ish) I still think (from what 37 Signals shown so far) that there is still a tool that caters more towards individuals managing their personal networks (a niche within the contact management niche if you will). Any thoughts on this?

[Elfan]

There happens to be a social networking site for old fashion networking. http://www.linkedin.com/

[jamiequint → Elfan]

Thanks for the link Elfan, I'm already a part of LinkedIn, but I think it is more of a tool for visualizing your connections not managing relationships. What do you think?

[Elfan → jamiequint]

I'm in college so I don't have that many direct connections and its how I have managed to stay in contact with people from summer work. I'm not sure how it will scale for me in the future.

But I'm *awful* at maintaining friendships, networks, and things for that nature. So I'm not a good person to take advice from on this.

[jamiequint → Elfan]

I'm in college too, actually, I've found facebook to be a good networking tool, especially some of the the global groups (there are a few good entrepreneurship ones), I've made some interesting connections through it.