Cloze: Revolutionizing Social Connections That Matter
A new startup company called Cloze has recently upgraded its functionality and features. What this service does is that it determines which of your online connections are your closest relationships based off of various factors. Beforehand, Cloze was only able to do this based off of email data such as frequency, the promptness, and the length. Running this through an algorithm and score system, the service prioritizes and ranks which people you are closest to. Because of user input, Close now has expanded to incorporate popular social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, becoming a hub for all your social connections. It will streamline all the information that is truly important to you, organizing your personal and professional connections.
This service is particularly helpful since we have a plethora of online connections today and people don’t have the time to sift through their social networks to determine who their closest friends are. Through Cloze, you get all the important information and updates about the people you really care about. Additionally, it analyzes the connections that people already have with others, recommending how to best network with them through your existing connections. All of this information is auto-updating on the cloud, so you always have it at your finger tips on various devices. With the influx of information that we all receive through our multiple social networks, who really has the time to go through all the useless updates and internet memes that plague news feeds?
In relation to our networks class, this service highlights the fact that nodes in a network have varying degrees of strength. Cloze takes information from existing online relationships and classifies them not simply as a strong or weak tie, but as a number and rank. In that way, this recommender system builds a much more complex web and notifies you which connections are stronger than others. Taking information from multiple social networks, a better picture of what your entire social network looks like is constructed and takes into account information that isn’t available on all networks. This is effective in determining how you can make new connections through the Strong Triadic Closure property. Social networks such as Facebook do this already, but Cloze takes this to another level and integrates all of your web connections on multiple networks.
Source: http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/17/cloze-social-network-integration/
The reason for Cloze’s scoring system isn’t to determine who you should connect with. It’s actually to solve a different problem: When you know you want to connect with someone (e.g. you work in sales and you want to sell to that person), who – among your existing connections – can give you the best introduction to the person you’re targeting?
That is, you inherently know the strength of your relationships to any of your connections – but you have no visibility into the strength of your connections’ relationships to their connections. In general, a connection on a social network is a poor indicator of the real-world ability to influence someone (especially in a business context). And, you’re really asking the question “who is most likely able to influence my target to spend time listening to me.” With Cloze’s scoring system we create transparency into the quality of 2nd degree relationships to solve this problem.
A related part of this is that, in the business world introductions are like a barter system (you ask for an intro, you’ll need to give a favor back at some point) – so, with Cloze, knowing who in your network can give you the best introduction also means you’re not wasting favors (you know you’re likely to get value for any favor you have to return).