Exchange: An untapped social network gold mine

Social networking is hugely interesting not only from a technology perspective but because of the new and unique ways it interconnects people and allows us to communicate. Brad Feld, an early investor in Web 2.0 and social networking companies, follows this space very closely. Brad was also the lead investor through the Mobius VC firm at my last company, StillSecure.  And he is continuing on his investment path in social networking and web 2.0 companies with his new firm The Foundry Group.

In a post this week on his blog, Brad raised the question; are businesses sitting on a gold mine of social networking data that's warehoused in their Exchange server? And, why isn't Microsoft leveraging it to their advantage? Here's a bit of that post:

The real data lives in the gazillions of Microsoft Exchange servers that are distributed around the world and connected to this magical thing called the Internet.  Don't think about your inbox (or your Outlook PST file) - think about "the server."  Yeah, I know - many large organizations run multiple Exchange servers - just envision an abstraction layer on top of them and think about each company.com address as a single element.

Email really is the old school version of social networking, albeit, a very serialized way to network with others. What's interesting to me about this idea is that existing data content, such as email, IM, text messaging, could all be fuel to help drive the engine of social networking.

Think about the online service, LinkedIn. I call it social networking for adults (a.k.a. professional people). Rather than building that network manually, exchange data could be used to actually build many of the social networking connections, and actually pre-populate much of that database.

While most companies we work for own the data in the email systems (we  are just users and don't own that data), Microsoft if they chose to would have the capability to analyze, connect data into networks, build social networking apps, and even interconnect exchange servers at a metadata level. I think that's Brad's point; Where is Microsoft in the social networking revolution? Do they not get the social networking revolution?