BuzzMe Equals Game Changer

I want to share a moment of revelation that I experienced recently. It occurred earlier this week when I watched Robert Scoble’s interview with Ajay Madhok, CEO of Equals. In the demo embedded below Ajay describes a new product they will introduce in a few months – BuzzMe. I think its going to be a game changer.

The basic idea of BuzzMe is to optimize the use of existing communication channels by making the selection of said channels context and relationship dependent. The premise is the following:

We have and use a vast array of communication tools/ channels: voice, email, SMS, IM, etc. There is a time and place for each of these tools, but unfortunately sometimes we find ourselves making use of a channel at the wrong time/place.

We all communicate with many different individuals, and our relationships with each one is unique. We communicate differently with each person depending on the relationship we establish with them. For example, you might communicate differently to a colleague than to a friend or your boss. Furthermore, communication is also influenced by our context. Where are we, what are we doing, how busy we are – these all make a difference as to how we communicate.

BuzzMe is basically a virtual agent that will keep track of your context (via Google calendar or your tweets, for instance), analyze incoming communication, and determine the optimal communication channel for you to use given your current situation and your relationship with whoever is trying to reach you.

So let’s say you are at a meeting or conference. You probably don’t want to get calls, at least not from everyone. So BuzzMe will send the average Joe to your voicemail, but will transfer through really important people whose call you cannot miss.

Say you are driving and shouldn’t really be reading emails. BuzzMe will transcribe the email to voice and read it to you while in the car. Alternatively, you may be in a situation where you can’t pick up the phone, but would like to get voicemails transcribed into text and sent to your email.

Say you are abroad. The BuzzMe agent will forward calls to a local phone.

In short, BuzzMe will know who your friends are, will know what you are doing, and will be able to provide you the optimal communication channel based on these two things.

What they didn’t cover in the video is blogging as a communication channel. I think it plays well into what they are doing. I may for instance, want to respond to a comment from a prominent fellow blogger more promptly than to a comment from Anonymous. BuzzMe could adequately push comments to my attention based on that information.

In my opinion, part of the genius of this whole idea is the safety benefit inherent in the service. Sharing your phone number, arguably sensitive information, with the public is no longer an issue because you have the BuzzMe virtual agent to buffer you from anyone trying to reach you.

Translate this to social networks as I think will inevitably happen. With an agent in the middle to determine how your profile is viewed it doesn’t matter what kind of information you dump into the virtual abyss.

It’s almost as if thinking about this whole social networking space as walled gardens is incorrect or insufficient. The visual is not enough. If my identity or profile is like a garden then I don’t really care to wall it off, but I want to present it differently to whoever chooses to look in. I want a transforming garden. An agent like BuzzMe could help me do that – a gardener to customize my garden for each and every one of my visitors.

What I find interesting is the thought that perhaps Google, with its FriendConnect initiative, is looking to become this middleman. Facebook seems to be thinking they own the data/ profiles/ gardens. Wrong, the users do. Google, on the other hand, seems content with being the gardener. I think this will make all the difference.

I’m now ranting and this is too long. Thoughts?