Social Garden
Tend your relationships
Technology has allowed people to develop larger social networks than previously done. But as a result, we have more relationships than we can manage. Social Gardening explores using plants as metaphor for relationships, hoping to encourage us to tend our social connections like we do our garden. By tracking and analyzing communications through email, instant messaging, social websites, SMS, and phone, Social Gardening proposes to give feedback on how our relationships are flourishing or wilting. It may also provide a practical interface to browse and manage conversations and contacts.
Social Garden is currently under development in various forms:
- a Mac application that records metacommunication, tracking your patterns in email, iChat, Facebook and other channels;
- a client for S60 phones that feeds the Mac app with call and SMS logs;
- a client for iPhone that feeds the Mac app with call and SMS logs and a garden browser;
- a Java applet that renders an XML file as a procedurally grown plant image.
A plugin architecture makes it simple to import other channels.