Method and system for relationship management and intelligent agent

Abstract

The present invention provides computer-based systems and methods directed to maintaining a database of user profiles based, respectively, on user interaction with third-party systems. The invention includes the processes of: accessing a unique user profile associated with a unique user; automatically collecting, by an agent module executing on a processor associated with a first system, data associated with the unique user based at least in part on the unique user's interaction with a system unassociated with the first system; evaluating by the processor the collected data and searching available databases to identify potential items of interest to the unique user based at least in part on the unique user profile and the collected data; determining a set of predicted items of interest to the unique user from the identified potential items of interest; and presenting at a display associated with the unique user data representing the set of predicted items of interest. In one implementation, the invention provides an intelligent agent possessing a level of “awareness” concerning individual users associated with user profiles or accounts and is adapted to access private and public databases, websites, resources, and other systems to efficiently collect, filter and deliver / present content and resources of interest to the individual user in a predictive fashion.

Description

RELATED APPLICATIONS[0001]The present application claims benefit of priority as a continuation of U.S. application Ser. No. 12 / 914,742, filed Oct. 28, 2010, entitled “Relationship Collaboration System,” which claims benefit of priority as a continuation of U.S. application Ser. No. 10 / 938,406, filed Sep. 10, 2004, entitled “Relationship Collaboration System,” issued Dec. 7, 2010 as U.S. Pat. No. 7,849,103, which claims priority under 35 U.S.C. §119(e) to U.S. Provisional Application Ser. No. 60 / 502,107, entitled “Relationship Collaboration System,” filed on Sep. 10, 2003, all of which applications are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety.COPYRIGHT NOTICE AND PERMISSION[0002]A portion of this patent document contains material subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document or the patent disclosure, as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office patent files or records, but otherwise r...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0016]In a further optional embodiment, the systems and methods described herein include user settings that allow a contact owner to control when access will be granted to their contacts. To this end, the systems and methods described herein can respond to a query for relationships from a user by generating a ranked list of contact owners that have what appears to be a relationship of interest to the user, and allow the user to identify the contact owner and to request permission to use that contact. In a further optional embodiment, the contact owner list may be anonymous in that a pseudonym is provided to identify some or all contact owners, thereby protecting the identity of the contact owner from individuals wishing to solicit access or use of their contacts.

Problems solved by technology

Some of these tools also have simple functionality to represent rudimentary relationship information, although they are typically time consuming to administer, difficult to set up and laborious to employ.

Moreover, these systems fail to distinguish between a valuable relationship and a less valuable contact, unless a user has manually entered a suitable note to that effect.

Consequently, when a user employs these tools it is difficult for the user to distinguish between relationships that are likely to be helpful, and relationships that are unlikely to be helpful.

Additionally, even if a user enters information about the value or relative strength or importance of a relationship, there is no reliable way to distinguish or measure the strength of a relationship to the same person or entity entered by two different users.

There is no basis or system for ensuring an objective method of how different users subjectively perceive or measure relationship strength.

An additional drawback with these existing systems is that they fail to provide desirable privacy protection for all participants in the system.

Both the privacy provided and the flexibility in choosing privacy levels are inadequate.

Even systems that do allow for some degree of flexibility in choosing privacy levels are too difficult and complex and impractical in practice.

Current systems with complex privacy controls are underutilized.

As such, individuals are hesitant to put information into an electronic address book or other system that can get swept into a publicly available or enterprise wide contact system that will allow anyone to directly contact people they have personal relationships with.

Existing contact systems fail to meet the need of organizations to better leverage relationships existing within its community.

Contact management systems do not adequately capture and rank relationships, they require manual entry and updating, and they do not provide adequate privacy protection for all participants.

Current contact management systems require substantial manual intervention, do not readily provide meaningful results, are difficult to search in a meaningful way and produce a subjective result.

Using current technology, it is difficult to determine which contacts are identified with which entities, and which relationships are both valid and meaningful.

These drawbacks, and others, make them poor tools for discovering contacts and relationships of participants in the network system.

Additional drawbacks in existing networking products (e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter) are opt-in, user-directed creation and maintenance of relationships.

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