Could you expand on what options exist currently? You say you are in the space, does that mean you have been keeping an eye on it, that you are working on something, or ?

I'm in the space in that I co-founded a company called Connect The Dots (ctd.ai) that certainly has the potential to solve this problem, but we're not focused on the PRM space right now (see point above re: unwillingness to pay). Perhaps down the road.

The two commercial tools that come to mind are:

* Dex (https://getdex.com/)

* Clay (https://clay.earth/)

Although neither have really nailed it (yet). Clay is more like a Superhuman-for-Contacts, whereas Dex is really going hard at being a true PRM.

The big open source tool out there is:

* Monica (https://www.monicahq.com/)

One problem I've had adopting such a system is that you want the system to help manage some load of work, e.g. maintaining your personal relationships. But using the product is itself work: you need to set it up, remember to use it, keep it up to date, etc. So, just as you've procrastinated keeping up with old friends, you procrastinate using the tool. And, of course, the tool doesn't reduce the workload of keeping up with friends. In fact, done successfully, your work has increased as you need to talk to your friends more often. So you're basically adding work (using the tool) to do work you didn't have the energy for in the first place (talking to your friends).

Everyone loves the idea of talking to their friends, conceptually. But, given ample time and opportunity, many choose not to keep up with friends. It's almost as if people only "want to want" to keep up with friends, rather than actually want it.

Yes yes absolutely 100x. That's another problem with the existing tools - they're a lot of work! You can say "we'll solve the duplicate contacts problem by ignoring it and letting using de-dupe themselves" welllll that's a lot of work!

And then there's the empty-database problem. I installed Monica a while back and the first thing it prompted me to do was.....input all my contacts. No Facebook import, no LinkedIn import, etc. Are you kidding me? I'm not rebuilding my friend graph from scratch. So I ditched the tool immediately (note: I haven't looked at it in years so it might have fixed some of those issues in the meantime).

And absolutely yes - there's the actual work of being in touch with people that you can't (or shouldn't, in a non-dystopian world) automate away. I'm sure someone will figure out how to rig up GPT-3 to do that but ughhhh...shiver please don't.

I believe a plugin (e.g. in Obsidian, Notion, Superhuman) could work better than Monica. In fact I think Superhuman has the bets oppportunity to create this product.