One of the better features of LinkedIn is the relationship map that shows your friends, and their friends, and their friends, and so on. It is a useful tool when you need to talk to someone you don’t know directly, or get information about them – just find a path through mutual friends. But we all know what sucks about LinkedIn. Contacts are sorted in only a single list, and there is no way to signal that one person is a closer contact than another person. Also, there is significant social pressure to simply accept anyone that asks into your network. My LinkedIn contact list is littered with people that I don’t know and that I accepted as contacts simply to avoid turning them, whoever they are, into enemies. Silicon Valley-based VisiblePath is a lot like LinkedIn, but it automatically determines who your real network is, and how strong each individual relationship is, based on your emails and calendar items that involve them. VisiblePath will officially launch next week at the Web 2.0 Expo. VisiblePath obtains the information on who you interact with via a 6 MB Outlook plugin. Each connection is graded on a percentage scale that strengthens from frequent communication and atrophies over time unless you are emailing or meeting with the person regularly. The company is also creating ways to track interactions beyond Outlook, through phone calls and instant messages. VisiblePath is engaging and insanely useful. It’s far superior to LinkedIn in measuring personal relationships, and it’s actually quite interesting to see just how close some of the people in your life actually are to you. Here’s a look at how it works. Setting Up Your Network By default, your network is seeded with low strength links to all the other users from that email domain, similar to how Facebook establishes networks. From there you can manage and interact with your network through the website, but the real utility comes from installing their Outlook plugin. Without it, VisiblePath can’t do as good a job establishing and gauging the strength of the relationships in your network. The Outlook plugin figures out your current network and tracks its changes by analyzing what contacts you made, who you emailed, and the meetings you scheduled. The plugin can run this scan daily, weekly, or monthly at any time of day. To “separate the wheat from the chaff” as CEO Antony Brydon → Read More