I saw a demo of Spreadd in Lisbon this morning. The tool is a very interesting application, a social appliance that runs in the background, automatically building user profiles based on the use of foreground apps, like email, Dropbox, Jive, SugarCRM, and almost any tool with an accessible API. Spreadd builds up a tag cloud for each user, based on the content in the files, emails, and other information provided to the foreground apps.

via Rocket Lilly

The automatically generated profiles are potentially useful in themselves, but Spreadd operates as an agent of serendipity, introducing people who might be of interest via email. For example, if I send an email on the topic of XYZ Corporation, Spreadd might introduce me to others who have XYZ Corporation in their recorded interests.

I find the tool very compelling. It reminds me of Visible Path and Tacit Knowledge, which did some of this in their solutions, both now in the dead pool.

I don’t have any screenshots, but there is a video on the website.