Sapere Aude
Tag: socialnetworks
heh
We may not be electing a President this November, but important elections are happening in your state – with control of Congress, state legislatures, school boards, and more at stake. So MySpace has partnered with Declare Yourself, a national nonpartisan, nonprofit campaign to energize and empower you. In 2004, DY registered over 1M young voters – this year, MySpace and DY are working together to make it easy for millions more to make a difference.
the definite talk on social networks
Recently, I have been spending some time on linkedin. Of all the social networks out there, it has the most appeal to me: There is less nonsense on it, and people are motivated to use it for work. Bergie had this link to an essay on linkedin as a platform play that I wanted to comment on.
There’s still a tragically high barrier to entry: without logging in to LinkedIn, you can only view a summary of the profile. This is total crap: it doesn’t make it easy for me as a user to extend the reach of LinkedIn. I’d love send that URL as my resume to people, but if they have to create an account to log in to LinkedIn, I’m not going to do it.
My public linkedin profile is already in the top 20 google results for my name. Making this more full-fledged would allow people to better take charge of their public image on the internets (something increasingly important)
For example, it’d be awesome if there was a JavaScript include that would list people’s endorsements of you. I’m sure people would love to put that in their blogs. And it’d be great for the coders out there if all the data in LinkedIn could be retrieved with simple REST calls that returned simple, XML formatted data-documents.
Linkedin has a lot of (currently dormant) currency it could use to become an important platform for user ratings. Just like Ebay has its seller / buyer ratings, the endorsements are quite valuable, but are locked into Linkedin today. The system would need better ways to deal with people who game the system, but it is off to a terrific start.
It’s frankly shocking that there aren’t LinkedIn feeds for events that occur in your social network. When someone gets a new job, you get an endorsement, someone else gets an endorsement, someone adds a new contact…all those activities that people may want to respond to are locked up in the system.
We are all busy, and who remembers to always go check the Linkedin homepage for new things happening? That’s so 1998.
You could even imagine something like this: people can write in their experiences applying for jobs at different companies. When you ask LinkedIn to send you resume to a job, it could tell you people’s over-all feel for that company. That’s the kind of collective/emergent wisdom that only a hosted application like LinkedIn can do.
Companies are people too 🙂 Why not make it possible to see how a company is viewed overall?
Speaking of hosted applications, LinkedIn could become the org-chart application for companies everywhere. Most large companies I’ve worked at had that funky applet you could go to in the intranet and pan through the org-chart. LinkedIn already has a ton of data that people have agreed to put in the clear. Instead of those boring, information skinny org-charts you’re used, LinkedIn could provide a much richer, and fatter org chart. Want to see endorsements that people have given Jane in IT? Does the fact that Jack has no endorsements mean you should avoid giving him The Big Project?
I am sure a lot of people are already using Linkedin to reverse engineer org charts from companies they do business with. Why not make this easier? If you are concerned about headhunters, offer a more competitive / attractive work environment. Is Linkedin listening? I’d sure like to see these things implemented. What do you think?
2006-12-04: LinkedIn, the MySpace for adults. Puff piece. They criticize the network spammers (mostly HR people), but offer no solution. They also think it is at a tipping point. I think so too. Much preferred over the crappy german xing
An investment from Hoffman would be the last piece of angel funding the startup needs. Now the 2 entrepreneurs must find people to help take their company to the next stage. “We are looking for a set of advisers who really understand the arc that a startup goes through. We need to identify who in our network can help us.”
2006-12-18: in which linkedin kills the headhunter middleman
They have an amazing job posting service where you can post the job on LinkedIn for around $150 and then it gives you the option of sending the not to people on your contact list. For someone like me that means I get to send to my best contacts easily.
2007-01-15: 
2008-01-05: LinkedIn Data Export. This worked great with gmail import. Now I have updated contact info for my whole network. Gmail did a nice merge for email addresses I already had.
2013-09-07: LinkedIn Spam. On the “thought leadership” spam that has infected linkedin. I’m still waiting for linkedin to be useful someday. It has been years now. I liked this comparison:
standing around on garish hotel ballroom carpet with a plastic cup of cheap chardonnay in one hand and a stack of business cards in the other.
2013-10-25: LinkedIn MITM email.
LinkedIn Intro is a new service by LinkedIn, adding inline data to all your iOS emails. “But how can they read my emails?!” you ask: you use the best encryption money can buy! Well, you just need to install one little security certificate… after all, how much of a a bad idea can it be? LinkedIn are well-known for their good security practices!
2022-10-20: And now it’s all fake accounts, the eventual fate of all social networks.
On October 10, 2022, there were 576562 LinkedIn accounts that listed their current employer as Apple Inc. The next day, 50% of those profiles no longer existed. A similarly dramatic drop in the number of LinkedIn profiles claiming employment at Amazon comes as LinkedIn is struggling to combat a significant uptick in the creation of fake employee accounts that pair AI-generated profile photos with text lifted from legitimate users.
I have been thinking about social networks for a while now. It is very nice to see my friends pondering these issues too:
Sooz
I think most of us need to be reminded that it’s important not to worry so much about how useful someone can be for you. I’d rather concern myself with just getting to know someone as a human and not worrying about the person’s usefulness in my life whether personally or professionally.
Social networks should ideally emerge first from sincere interest in others as fellow humans, not simply as nodes which exist solely to serve some agenda. The business and productivity implications/advantages of new social networks are, in my experience, directly derived from the trust established by getting to know someone first. So, let’s not put the cart before the horse. Thanks to Sooz for helping me polish my thoughts on this topic.
I agree with these sentiments and also with Jon Udell’s take. I wonder how iI will keep it all together? I collect humans was coined by Sooz, btw.
The augmented social network: Building identity and trust into the next-generation internet
Someone built the system, they assumed certain user behaviors. The users came on and exhibited different behaviors. And the people running the system discovered to their horror that the technological and social issues could not in fact be decoupled.
This strikes home with my experience helping to build different tools over the years.
I finally got around to read shirkys longish essay about groups being their worst enemy. There is too much good material in the piece to give it justice with commentary, so I will just quote interesting paragraphs instead.
People who work on social software are closer in spirit to economists and political scientists than they are to people making compilers. They both look like programming, but when you’re dealing with groups of people as one of your run-time phenomena, that is an incredibly different practice.
It’s very difficult to coordinate a conference call, because people can’t see one another, which makes it hard to manage the interrupt logic. In Joi’s conference call, the interrupt logic got moved to the chat room. People would type “Hand,” and the moderator of the conference call will then type “You’re speaking next,” in the chat. So the conference call flowed incredibly smoothly.
1.) If you were going to build a piece of social software to support large and long-lived groups, what would you design for? The first thing you would design for is handles the user can invest in. 2.) Second, you have to design a way for there to be members in good standing. Have to design some way in which good works get recognized. 3.) You need barriers to participation. This is one of the things that killed Usenet. You have to have some cost to either join or participate, if not at the lowest level, then at higher levels. There needs to be some kind of segmentation of capabilities. 4.) And, finally, you have to find a way to spare the group from scale. Scale alone kills conversations, because conversations require dense 2-way conversations. In conversational contexts, Metcalfe’s law is a drag.
I am writing to find out something from you. I have my sister who lives in Boston right now, and having a really TOUGH time finding employment. What are the opportunities like? I used to live in Boston, actually, I attended Suffolk, and I can’t believe that she can’t find anything. How about your company, do you think you can work some magic?
i’m getting solicitations from strangers on ryze now.
interpreting friendster photos
enthusiastic +1
can you reach 101?
I take part in various of the newfangled social network sites because I am curious as to where they may lead us. Since I started, I had a couple quite interesting things happen to me thanks to that acquaintance of acquaintance model. However, one thing has become increasingly clear over the months: The need to remain in control of your social network.
Currently, a lot of the social network sites try to capitalize on the phenomenon, and they make damn sure you do not subvert their networks. None of them provides a way to export your network as FOAF, for instance. Most of them also make sure that they remain the only tie you have to some of your acquaintances, and thus outlaw any information in your profile that could uniquely identify you outside your profile within their system.
It has become a pastime of mine to devise ways to slip those global identifiers into my profiles without drawing the attention of the site operators. What worked for me so far is to hint at applicable Google terms I own.
Only in San Francisco could there be a rally that is aligned with my cause.
Friendster, which opened to the public in March and is still in beta, will hit 1M users this week, and is expanding at a rate of 20% a week. Danah Boyd, a U.C. Berkeley Ph.D. student researching online social networks, said Friendster is beginning to have an “unbelievable impact” on its target demographic, urban-dwelling 25- to 35-year-olds.
“You go into a club and people are talking about it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people (talking) about it in a social situation.”
Boyd said the word “friendster” is entering common usage. Just as “googling” has become synonymous with Internet search, she explained, “friendster” is now used to describe a person that someone meets or knows through the network. A friendster is not exactly a friend, but rather an online acquaintance about whom a lot is known, thanks to the degree of disclosure in their social resume, which, of course, may or may not be true.
As my friend Fabian can testify, Friendster is everywhere in the US tween group. Before long, it will likely enter Europe in a big way, and prepare the minds here for social networks.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 