“I’m the kind of guy who can’t keep a plant alive for a week, let alone a relationship” – Jerry O’Connell

Throughout our social lives on the internet, we tend to maintain many more relationships than we do in real life. Keeping all those relationships healthy and staying in touch with everyone becomes more of a chore, and sometimes it’s just hard to remember when you did what!

The Social Garden project from MIT MediaLabs comes in to help solve this problem. Using a plug-in architecture, this Mac OS software will track your interactions with each individual through emails, social networking sites, phone calls, text messages, instant messages and many other channels and tools.  Social Garden will represent each of your relationships as a plant, tracking its progress over time. The more frequent your interactions are with a person, the healthier and bigger the plant will be. This visualization maybe displayed on your computer, mobile phone or even a photo frame.

This will certainly be a fun and pleasant way to be reminded of the person you haven’t heard from in a while, if only it could understand the content of the interactions. Currently, Social Garden will only be able to track the frequency, but hopefully with an infusion of NLP (Natural Language Processing) it might be able to give a more accurate representation of the relationship.

Do you feel overwhelmed by the amount of relationships you have to maintain online? Do you think Social Garden might help you? Let us hear your thoughts.

The Concept of Social Garden