Patent ID: 7822739

Claim:
A method for exploitation of a social network to derive a location of an employee in a corporation utilizing instant messaging or automatic telephone calls, comprising: receiving a search request for a location of an employee; looking up a social network or acquaintance list of the employee in a corporate database; extracting a list of contacts of the employee from the social network or acquaintance list in the corporate database; presenting the list of contacts, in response to the search request; polling the list of contacts to locate the employee via at least one of instant messaging and automatic telephone calls; receiving the location of the employee, in response to polling the list of contacts; and alerting the list of contacts that the employee has been located; wherein the corporate database comprises at least one of: an acquaintance list database that is defined by the employee, the acquaintance list database comprising: selected ones of a plurality of coworkers input by the employee; and non-coworkers input by the employee; and a social network database that comprises: input extracted from external social networking entities; and input extracted from emails, instant messages, or telephone calls to and from the employee; and wherein the input extracted from the external social networking entities for the social network database is extracted by at least one of: receiving login information to the external social networking entities corresponding to the employee and accessing the external social networking entities to obtain contacts for the list of contacts; and snooping on the employee's communication connections to the external social networking entities to obtain contacts for the list of contacts.