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I have an idea for an application that would keep track of my relationships - friends, colleagues, family, so on. Its main purpose is to help me stay on top of regular contact and interactions, something that's easy for me to fall behind on. Ideally, it would also help me to develop and nurture positive and healthy relationships, while winding down and backing away from unhealthy ones. I called the idea an FRM, a play on CRM (swap friend for customer).

As I thought about building this, I realized that I'd need to access my contacts and social interactions across platforms. After all, I talk to some friends on discord, others via sms, or whatsapp, and there's one group chat on signal. There's email, slack, google calendar, instagram, hinge.

That's a lot of platforms, and mostly they are not friendly to third party developers. I find this to be a real shame. I should be able to interact with my data on any major platform in whichever way I see fit. Email, an open protocol, supports this - I could download my inbox and parse my emails. However, even sms, plain text messaging stored locally on my phone, is apparently not trivial to scrape.

I believe these closed systems hurt developers and consumers. This is becoming more apparent in the age of LLMs, when my locked away data is used by the closed platforms to build their own models, used against or sold back to me.

I'd love to have a database of all of my social interactions throughout my digital life. Pictures and videos. Train and interact with models on that data set. "Talk" to myself at various stages of my life, get perspective on various events and relationships in my life.

For the foreseeable future, unfortunately, this is a pipe dream.