Dosi.io is a new Chrome extension that builds a better dossier at the top of LinkedIn profiles where it helps you determine who’s worth your time. Once installed, LinkedIn stalking gets a lot more interesting, as Dosi.io displays more information about the person in question by pulling in additional data from CrunchBase, GitHub and AngelList. It also displays a score indicating that person’s importance to you in terms of how well they match your networking goals.
The extension, built here at the TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 hackathon, is currently designed for the developer crowd, but the creators intend to bring it to other communities in the future.
You can think of Dosi.io as something like a Rapportive for LinkedIn, explains co-creator Niles Brooks, who’s also the co-founder of sustainable restaurant guide Clean Plates. He says he came up with the idea for the extension the midnight before the hackathon’s start. Kenneth Chen, a software developer in the finance industry, had been thinking about things along the same lines, he tells us, and decided to team up on the project along with third member, Vijith Assar.
In a nutshell, the extension’s secret sauce is a combination of the number of followers a person has and the general impact they might have. From AngelList, it knows whether or not you have an account – a signal in and of itself – as well as the number of followers you have there. That information also helps Dosi.io know what companies to query up on CrunchBase, where it learns about the investments a company has, the sale price of a company, and the total amount of funding a person has raised over their lifetime. And on GitHub, Dos.io learns the commits you’ve made, the number of public repos you’re involved in, and again, the number of followers the person has.
All of this data is boiled down into a simple visualization that appears directly above LinkedIn profiles, which also shows you a person’s overall Dosi.io score. Ranging from 1 to 10, the score is meant to convey how much of your time that person warrants. Brooks says he imagines this score becoming even more useful one day as a Google Glass application using facial recognition, where it could help users better network while at conferences and other events. (Nope, not creepy at all!)
The extension today is client-side JavaScript, and though it’s live, they’re running into rate limits and other issues. In other words, it technically works, but it doesn’t really work right now. That should change soon, though. Going forward, the team plans to continue Dosi.io’s development, bringing it to email inboxes, other browsers, smartphones and yes, even other industries.
