Personally social CRM

[erlend.sh]

Continuing the discussion from Open Source, source available, private..?:

I would happily pay $100/yr for an atmospheric version of Dex, a constituents (people) relationships manager for both professional and personal use. Sifa is well on its way there already.

Many of us here have hundreds or even thousands of contacts from just the open social web circles alone.

Doing the Dex-thing well has only been possible as of very recently, since permissioned-data is now far enough along that preliminary versions of it are being implemented.

I’d want to pay for such an app because it’s going to be holding on to an increasing amount of sensitive data for me (imported emails and other such private conversation transcripts or meta-data of past exchanges), and if the app isn’t getting paid to take care of my data then it’ll increasingly be incentivised to do other things with my data to sustain itself.

Today I had a go at sketching this out as a standalone atmosphere app, using Claude Design (first time I’ve ever properly used any of this stuff).

Here’s the starting prompt:

I wanna sketch out the UX for a “personal CRM” (CRM as in constintuent-relationships manager as opposed to customer-relationships manager). A pretty good example of this already exists in Dex (https://getdex.com/) so that’s a good reference. But I imagine the ideal interface to be much more chat-like. Basically I’m envisioning “if Discord/Telegram was a CRM”. Where do we go from there?

A few guided prompts later I had this:

Interactive demo: https://erlend-sh.github.io/social-crm.html

I knew disnet had already made semble-it as a minimal alt-interface for Semble, so we got to talking about doing something similar for Sifa, narrowly focused on the use case outlined above.

Now there’s a working proof-of-concept cooking:

GitHub - disnet/at-crm

This mock-up has yet to go through an ‘atproto-pass’, which is where it gets a lot more fun and cozy-feeling. If anyone wants to jam with us on that, give us a shout!

The atmospheric @handle should show prominently for anyone who’s also on the Atmosphere, and their profiles should heavily rely on sifa.id by @gui.do (who we will happily collab/coordinate with on all this).

I’m especially keen to have editable fields for interests, skills and location, which overlaps neatly with events apps that want to facilitate local-area networking.

[gui.do]

Oh nice. And I can see with atproto, it should be much easier to keep the "last contact date” up to date.

Many of these things rely on maybe you last e-mail or last LinkedIn message. But then if you just messaged them last week on Instagram, that’s not captured. Atproto could greatly help out in that area.

So to you mainly see this working as an additional informtion layer on top of existing atproto communication apps, or will this app itself also have the means to communicate with someone?

And yeah, permissioned data being available will be a must for this.

[erlend.sh]

@gui.do

So to you mainly see this working as an additional informtion layer on top of existing atproto communication apps, or will this app itself also have the means to communicate with someone?

Good question. I’ve been going a bit back and forth about it but I figure the easiest thing is to only use this app for information aggregation and then have outgoing links to the actual comms apps, which in the case of anything atmospheric will be seamless.

It should however be possible to edit things like my sifa profile from within the CRM.

[gui.do]

Your own profile: for sure.

In the history of CRMs though: people had to add/update all info themselves. With atproto that might not be needed, but you might still want to add info to another person. And since you cannot add their PDS, you need to store in in another way. And that other way cannot be on-protocol, because you don’t want to add private/PIP/GDPR on protocol.

Still: auto-updating role names or employers in a CRM would be amazing!

[erlend.sh]

@gui.do

And that other way cannot be on-protocol, because you don’t want to add private/PIP/GDPR on protocol.

How so? Like, if I’ve got a private email contact for you that I want to securely add to my saved contact of you, would saving that data privately on my PDS so,show be in breach of GDPR?

I’m saving the data as a private individual, not as a data-aggregating platform, so I’m not seeing how this would be any different from me keeping a Google doc of my contacts’ emails, which is surely not in breach.

[gui.do]

Well I mean: not today without permissioned/private data storage on the PDS because you’d be adding a lot of private data of other people to your PDS.

But yeah, once we have permissioned data we can do that!