Unified Media Search

This is a simple idea that I've been formulating for some years:

What happens when people want to look back and find something? Interactions from people lost long ago?

Sure, each social media site allows you to go back and find things/people/whatevers you posted from a long time ago, but that doesn't help in the long run, because they come and go.

For this I have an idea, some kind of a background service that checks your accounts, automatically adds contacts to its file, and your correspondence, chronologically. All of this wouldn't just come from one source either, emails, texts, voicemails, and forms of communication we haven't even imagined yet, mixed together with a base platform with rich plug-in hooks to process the data.

It would be a tool for social engineers, scholars, detectives, and regular people tired of managing their digital lives across so many services.

The basic service would be fairly simple to build, initial extension points I see would be:

• Inputs/Parsers (create "messages" or "contacts" from files or services)
• Reports (visual ways of viewing/manipulating stored data and analyzers)
• Analyzers (Something that creates tentative links between things, could be by phone numbers, IP addresses, lat and longs, facial recognition, writing styles, etc.)

I suspect the initial data would be fairly simple to structure as well, each message would have:

• Date
• Sender(s)
• Receiver(s)
• Format
• Extracted text/Resources
• Original Message

Basic outputs I would like to see are:

• Who knows who? A map between people likely to know each other (good for looking up someone you don't remember)
• Conversation history, show all conversations between two people on a timeline, from all media sources.
• Happenings, mapping when people got together and where, creating "events" in a timeline.