By Nathan Dukes
Yesterday we brought you one of the left field uses SAP has been coming up with for their business intelligence offerings.
The first was 2010 Football Experience, which you can read more about here.
The second is the Friend Network Optimiser, a Facebook application that produces an Interactive dashboard of your online worth.
The application provides Facebook users a run down of their online activity compared to their friends, and provides interactive pointers to help expand your network.
Built with SAP Crystal Presentation (formerly Xcelsius), application is a fun showcase of the features available in SAP Crystal solutions.
After selecting a group of friends, the application collects data about you, your friends and their networks, and then details the information in a series of dashboards, as you could with business data if you bought the tool for your organisation.
A series of sliders show your current activity for the last 5 days for status updates, photo uploads, events and wall posts. By sliding the tab in either direction to hypothetically increase or decrease your activity, other values update in real time to predict your potential social worth, had you, for example, posted 15 photos instead of 3.
The primary representation of this worth is a points system, which calculates the numerical value of your network, and ranks you against other application users.
Other tools include a network reach tab, which is shows the number of people you can reach through Facebook, based on your number of friends and the size of their own networks. Working in tandem with this is a tab which displays four of your friends and what percentage of your network activity they represent. You can then hypothetically ‘unfriended’ each person on this list to see how this effects your network reach.
Inversely, the application suggests people who you may want to become friends with, and updates your network reach with a similar hypothetical figure. If your network worth is important, the results of this simple test could be used to justify whether it’s worthwhile becoming friends with them at all.
Like the FIFA World Cup dashboards we brought you yesterday, the application is simply a quirky real world use of what would normally be a powerful business tool.
Given SAP’s relationship with LinkedIn (see here and here), it will be interesting to see if SAP produces a similar application for the LinkedIn platform.
The tool could have much more use for business professionals and people who rely heavily on their LinkedIn network for their work.
SAP has confirmed it is currently undertaking a joint development project with LinkedIn, but no details have been released at this time.
