Skydeck: My Social Network

Last week I managed to snag one of TechCrunch’s 500 Skydeck invites. Skydeck is a new web startup that says the “most important social network is the one in your phone.” Basically Skydeck connects to your cell phone provider’s website (you give it your account username and password) and, very much like Mint, downloads your call log. Once you upload the vCard from your Address Book, Skydeck connects the phone numbers with your call log and creates your network. All calls/text messages can be tagged, logged, etc which then let you search through them very easily. Want to see how much time you spend on the phone for work? Tag business calls. Want to see if any of you calls/messages incurred additional charges? Skydeck will show you that as well. In the Address Book each person is ranked based on call volume and information is displayed showing the date of the last call, if you make all the calls to that person or if they call you more, and any tags attached to that person.

The system is very simple, focusing on just the Call Log and the Address Book. Although it’s simple, it’s search and tag features are quite impressive and give a very good view of just what your phone habits are. It would be nice, as Skydeck moves through it’s beta stages, to include integration into other social sites, like Facebook. The only real gripe I have with Skydeck (and it’s not really their fault) is that the system has no means of updating mid-billing cycle. The problem is that my cell provider doesn’t update their system until the bill is printed. So, right now the most current data Skydeck provides is from March 13th. The crazy thing is that because my cell provider keeps copies of online bills just about forever, Skydeck’s data goes all the way back to June of 2006 (or over 7500 phone calls).

All in all it’s a pretty cool little startup doing one thing pretty well. It’ll be interesting to see what features are added throughout the beta before the system goes full tilt. If you want to get in and play with Skydeck, I have a few invites available so get in touch with me and I’ll pass one on.