It's not what you know ... it's who you know!

Meet Kate Mines. Kate is a Salesforce.com customer, and an actress living in Burbank CA. We "met" on the SFDC Community Message Board. More recently, we've started to exchange emails.

Yeah, she's a hottie -- and she's very smart. Reading through all the entries in her blog (and I read ALL of them), I can tell that she's not just smart -- she's geeky smart. She totes her laptop and digital camera around wherever she goes, Skypes with friends while shooting a film in Jordan (as in the Middle East country), trolls the internet to find cool sites like Packing List Online ... and somehow found a way to create a Force.com developer account. In other words, she's part of the geeky MySpace generation (like me) and wants to take full advantage of this Wacky Web 2.0 World -- without even knowing what Web 2.0 is. And that's pretty damn cool.

As smart as she is, Kate clearly knows the old adage "It's not what you know, it's who you know" is more true in Hollywood than anywhere else. So she wants an application that helps her keep track of all the people she's come to know. Not just who she knows, but how she knows them, who they are, what they do, where they met, how often they've been together on the same set / audition / workshop, etc.

I trolled around her personal website (www.katemines.com), and that led me to other internet services that people in the acting world use -- like IMDb.com and ActorsAccess.com.

Both seem like powerful tools. They are social networking tools for the acting world, but neither of them allow Kate to do what she really wants to do. In her words,

Somtimes I'll work with a director at a theatre, but I want to link them to their agent, and then a casting event I met them at. When I look at one of my contacts, I want to see all the places we've met. It needs to be cross searchable, so if I can only remember the conference name, location or date, or whatever, I can search by all of these, you know?

Classic social networking application, right? But even while there are many social networking tools out there (LinkedIn, MySpace, FaceBook, etc.), all designed to bring social contacts together, none of them do what Kate needs.

I guess that kinda surprised me. How is it that the acting world doesn't have an application like LinkedIn? Actors need to track their social connections, just like business people do. They need to track the degrees of social separation within their contact network, and find ways to get connected to those who can further their career. But more than just tracking 1st, 2nd, and 3rd degree connections (ala LinkedIn), people like Kate want to track their connection history. How often have I met this person? Show me all the dates and events that we were at together. What role was this person performing at each event (starring role, supporting role, director role, etc), and what role was I performing at that same event?

It's a fascinating application, and I'm really looking forward to working on this project.