Today I’m releasing Peepdex, a goal-focused personal addressbook and networking tool. Peepdex is for people who want to actively develop their relationships, by frequently meeting new people and maintaining contact with people you already know.

Basically, peepdex is a customizable addressbook— you can track the usual phone and address stuff or, if you want, track everyone’s favorite food. You can also define and track specific goals for adding contacts or interacting with existing contacts. For example, you can set a
goal about keeping in touch with your parents:

This goal will be visible on your dashboard, with the green part of the pie chart showing your progress in the past month. When you call a parent, you can track that progress by adding a note logging that call your parent’s peepdex page.

Sound like a lot of paperwork? I guess it is. But I’ve been at a loss for a system to manage my personal and professional network. It’s the same kind of motivation that led me to building Voo2do: a personal responsibility that I need help achieving. In this case, I’m seeking a way to track all the people I meet at conferences, local geek events, and through friends. I want a way to query my network for people who might want to work with me, and I want to make sure that I’m regularly interacting with prospective partners to keep tabs on their projects. More broadly, I want a way to develop and sustain a huge number of friendships, because friends make me happy. But I’m forgetful, and without a plan I’m liable to lose touch with people I don’t see on a regular basis. Facebook and LinkedIn help a bit, but not in the kind of personal detail that I want. That’s where peepdex fits in.

If peepdex sounds like it could be useful, try out the introduction. As always, feedback is welcome.

P.S. I’m wrapping up my thing-a-week campaign with this project. It’s been a fun and educational adventure, but I’m now starting to do freelance/consulting work. If you might be interested in working with me, drop me a line.

Yesterday I released the third project in my thing-a-week campaign. It’s my first facebook app, Oracle on facebook.

This is an adaptation of Thing #1, OracleBot, which is a game where players take turns writing an answer to the previous player’s question, or a question that corresponds to a previous player’s answer. At each step you can only see the one previous line, and the payoff is that at the end of the game you have an initial question, a final answer, and a funny, strange, unpredictable step-by-step connection between them.

Among the first few users of OracleBot.com, one of the most requested features was a way to play with friends — either by creating an invite-only room in the standalone Oraclebot.com app, or by playing in an existing social network like facebook. Playing with friends can enrich the game — it lets you make inside jokes and learn about each other through the game. It seemed worthwhile for me to spend some time learning how to build facebook apps, and facebook provides some very powerful ways to distribute the game to new users, so I decided to work on that. I sent out my first batch of invites to some friends yesterday afternoon.

You may have noticed that this release is late by about a week. This has been a major source of concern for me; the whole point of thing-a-week is to avoid sinking too much time into any individual project, and to practice the skill of identifying a small set of features that can be built and released in a very short time frame. There are a few reasons for the delay, but I’ll be honest: they aren’t all good reasons. Some of them are good: I’ve been exploring some new ideas and potential partnerships that will likely develop into larger projects. And the facebook platform is much broader than I initially thought, with a lot of different integration points that I’ve begun to understand. But I can’t say I was optimally focused or disciplined over the past two weeks, either. If I had worked better, I probably could have shipped this project sooner.

In particular, I think I spent a lot of time worrying about having enough features to make the facebook app interesting. The facebook release was looming at some point in the future, and with the wide variety of ways an app can integrate with facebook– many unfamiliar to me– it was hard to tell when I had the right set of features to trust that the app took meaningful advantage of the facebook platform. In retrospect, I should have started by releasing a trivial facebook port — the same app, but playable on facebook “canvas” pages and using facebook’s account data instead of requiring you to type in your name. I could probably have done that in a couple of days, and added in the other features– rooms, invitations, access controls, and others I haven’t built yet like publishing completed games to your news feed– gradually, each one getting its own release and user feedback.

On the other hand, working in a new environment like facebook is rarely as easy as it first appears. And I spent a lot of time over the past week exploring some interesting opportunities to partner with friends of mine on their projects. More on that later.