Xen’Do is Awesome (18th Century Sense: Impressive tinged with Fear)

Today was one of those “whoa”: this stuff is impressive, powerful and the tiniest bit scary. (Not that I haven’t, to paraphrase Kubrick, learned to stop worrying and simply love the cloud).

Signed up for Xendo via Yammer, and then proceeded to add all the usual suspects of my cloud services: Salesforce, Twitter, Gmail, LinkedIn, Office 365, Evernote, Trello — hey, to learn things sometimes you have to have redundancies (even if you have to pay for the privilege).

Let it whir and churn for a while as it builds primary indexes for the first time. But before long, you’ve got an “internal” search engine of quite some (staggering) power. I searched upon my former colleague/treasurer of Columbia Business School Alumni of MetroDC, Dana Scherer, a Virginia resident who works for the Federal Government.

The result set was impressive — her contact information in my multiple synchronized systems; her attendance at events as recorded in Salesforce, along with her ticketed purchases from the club. Google drive stored versions of contact clean up exports that I, mental pack-rat that I am, simply save. A reference to her in a backup of a WordPress database (evidently unencrypted). It goes on and on — just as this image does here.In fact, what you’re seeing and about to scroll through is truncated, because no browser based screenshot tool that I know of will capture a sample as tall as this is.

(To give a slight preview, here is the search results dashboard detailing source, record type and chronological allocation of the search results. Nifty, eh?)  But that’s where that slight tinge of fear comes from.  If, courtesy of Xendo I can aggregate information like that — just imagine what people who truly know their way around systems can do.  The Snowden halo is hard to ignore.  Still, for lil’ole me: it’s simply fun — oh and useful.

A Preview of the Results with Descriptive Stats & Chronological Allocation
A Preview of the Results with Descriptive Stats & Chronological Allocation

So: get ready to tire your thumbs as you scroll through the (extremely) truncated search results.

Tall & Narrow: Lots of Results
Tall & Narrow: Lots of Results