Done.
The LinkedIn service (like many a YASNS) asks you to fill out a bunch of forms and then displays your identity to you and others one degree away. I found this a tad unintuitive as after filling out the forms, I only then became aware of how this would look in my profile. Naturally, after seeing this and the sweet titles that others had made up for themselves, I had to go back and change mine because it was too long and not catchy.
I found LinkedIn to be a tad strange in this respect... that is, it wants you to be someone with a career. I'm not sure I have a career... I have goals but even those (like "to help people") are somewhat abstract and span a whole slew of possible industries other than "make money" and "kill people".
LinkedIn is somewhat hobbled by the privacy vs. networking trade-off. For example, the only person that will read this blog entry, danah, has a shitload of connections and I'm sure they're all very interesting people. However, I'm not allowed to see any of her connections. In social networking, this is a squeeze spot... that is, none of danah's connections will ever know I am connected to her and won't be able to connect with me, presumably because of privacy considerations.
Doesn't that defeat the whole idea of networking? I think they need a more complex model and infrastructure for networked connections. People should be able to 1) decide which of their connections are viewable by others of their connections (which could be a pain in the ass but undoubtedly better than the current state of affairs) and 2) decide whether or not a certain connections connections can view their profile.
It's all about information theory... signal to noise. LinkedIn practically floods us with noise as people put themselves on a pedestal. That's why any real employment connections that are catalyzed by LinkedIn will have to be vetted to ensure that one is who they say they are.
Posted by joebeone at Mayo 14, 2004 08:23 AMI think that all these Yet Another Frienster Clone (Yet Another Social Networking Service) sites are fairly lame. Sixdegrees was novel but useless, and all of its successors can be categorized more-or-less the same way. I don't think that YASNS is useful as a "connections" tool, because none of my "serious" colleagues will stoop to the level of establishing an Orkut profile. I mean, I used to work for a DoD think tank - valuable contacts, but can you imagine them establishing an Orkut profile, and rating each other for their sexiness and coolness?
I know when I learned/thought about relationship graphs in high school psychology, the first thing that came to mind was "hey! we could implement this on the computer, and then we'd know what everyone secretly thought of us!" It couldn't have worked then because only computer geeks would have used it, and even now I think YASNS suffers from a similar effect. Friendster is friendly enough and Orkut is chic enough to actually attract users in droves (one of my friends remarked that frienster was "like having little trading cards for all of your friends") and I do know some people who have looked for dates on Orkut (although Craigslist probably remains more popular). Nonetheless, YASNS still doesn't seem to have its "killer feature" that makes it actually useful. I've met droves more people on LiveJournal than on YASNS.
I think one of the major failings of YASNS is that they are so insular. The networks established are totally confined to people listed on that site, and the YASNS come and go like Geocities pages of old. When you think about it, the local extension of a profile on YASNS is - wait for it - A PERSONAL WEB PAGE. Establish a personal page, link to your friends, and suddenly we have a distributed YASNS.
And in fact, that's what most "serious" people who are online do. They have web pages. They link to their publications and their colleagues and their pets and their family. YASNS has the "click to publish" feature going for it, the same thing that's made the blogosphere possible (and simultaneously filled it with mindless drivel - have you watched the "LiveJournal most recent posts" feed?). Anyway, add FOAF, RSS, GeoURL, etc, and a personal web page can get linked into the interweb just as well as a profile on one of these YASNS is linked into that private network. Maybe.
My current experiment is with a Wiki. I hope it kind-of merges the worlds of blogs, friendsters, and static content. The aim is to have a virtual representation of the Berkeley campus that anyone can contribute to.
http://csua.berkeley.edu/~tobin/wiki
I'm very curious to make it into a sort of GeoWiki.