Lee Hill's "Living LinkedIn"

Google Aims to Break Open the Closed World of Social Networking, By Dylan Tweney

Lee Hill — 2007-11-05T10:16:04-06:00

OpenSocial enables developers to learn a single set of API's and write applications that work in multiple places, minimizing work and maximizing distribution.

It's about time someone cracked the social networking nut.

Google is expected to announce a social networking platform later this week. Called OpenSocial, it will include tools to allow developers to create applications that utilize personal and social data contained in participating social networks. It is the first step toward putting you back in control of your online relationships.

"Facebook and MySpace are trying to build a proprietary web platform," says John McCrea, vice president of marketing at Plaxo, one of Google's partners in deploying OpenSocial. "Those of us that believe in openness saw that as a threat to the open web."

As Wired News complained earlier this year, social networks like MySpace and Facebook profit by keeping data about you and your friends locked up. And while it's possible to replicate much of the functionality of Facebook using open-source tools, the critical missing component is the "social graph" -- the map of relationships between people that makes it possible for you to see when your friends add applications, photos or new connections to their profiles.

Google appears to be supplying that missing piece, with tools to allow developers access to the social graph and other personal data on participating networks.

While the announcement later this week will initially interest only developers, it's the first step towards building interoperable networks where users actually own their own data.

Slide CEO Max Levchin compares the Google API to the first wave of video games: techy and not very flashy, but a precursor of things to come.

"You look at something like Pong now and it compares poorly with what we have today, but at the time it was like a nuclear bomb in the gaming industry," Levchin says. "Right now you look at the applications on Facebook and there just isn't that much that's really sophisticated. There's years of development before we see something like Quake in social networks, but that's where this is going."

As first reported on TechCrunch, OpenSocial is a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that will allow independent developers to build applications that run on any participating network, using the data stored by that network.

OpenSocial is designed to enable developers to access three specific pools of data: users' profile information, friends info (the social graph), and activities.

A Google spokesperson confirmed that the new API will be supported by a long list of second-tier players in the American social networking space: Hi5, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Orkut, Ning and Friendster. In addition, blogging platform vendor Six Apart confirmed to Wired News that it would be supporting OpenSocial.

Enterprise software vendors Salesforce and Oracle round out the list of potential platform supporters, while widget developers RockYou, Slide, iLike and Flixster have signed on to supply applications based on the platform.

The participating networks have far fewer users in the United States than their leading competitors. According to ComScore, MySpace has 68 million monthly U.S. users, Facebook boasts 30 million and the OpenSocial networks together have just 22 million monthly U.S. users.

However, they are aiming at different markets. The participation of LinkedIn, Salesforce and Oracle suggests that the fruits of OpenSocial may include a crop of business-oriented social networking applications, far different from the fun-and-games orientation of most Facebook and MySpace apps.

"The killer app for OpenSocial will be somebody making a really good spreadsheet component," says Anil Dash, chief evangelist for Six Apart. "There's no way a company wants to host an application like that on Facebook, especially in the world of [regulatory laws] HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley. It would just be asinine."

LinkedIn senior director of products Adam Nash says his company's users will probably see the impact of the new partnership with Google sometime in early 2008, although it won't necessarily be about connecting with other social networks, as some have suggested. "What you'll see in the end is great third party developers making even more business apps for us very soon," he said.

In fact, the company is going to demo one such app called the Conference Calendar at a Google event this week. According to Nash, the new app will automatically know what industry you work in (based on your LinkedIn profile) and subsequently spit out a series of relevant upcoming conferences based on this info.

Adam Gross, vice president of development and marketing at Salesforce, also says he expects OpenSocial will do wonders for his company's ability to provide its customers with even more useful data.

"This continues a trend of using consumer technologies to make business technologies better," Gross says. "From my point of view, OpenSocial is really about the widget economy we've seen in a short amount of time build up around social networking," he added. "OpenSocial is energizing that economy now as developers work can be translated to different contexts and platforms."

In that sense, Google's open APIs will "pour even more fuel on a rapidly burning fire."

There are hurdles. One is building sufficient momentum when the two biggest social networking sites are not represented.

Another is complexity, says Socializr CEO and Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams. "Previous efforts like FOAF [friend of a friend] and OpenID were pretty complicated. For something to be useful from the user's perspective it has to be simple and easy," says Abrams.

Regardless, Google's move is a big bet on interoperability -- and against the "winner take all" philosophy of social networking, according to Six Apart's Dash.

"The market has already decided that there's going to be a long tail of social networks, and that people are going to belong to more than one. As soon as you belong to more than one, this kind of interoperability is critical," Dash says. "Open standards win every time."

Google Cracks Open The World Of Social Networks, By Scott Gilbertson

Lee Hill — 2007-11-05T10:14:51-06:00

http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/10/google-cracks-o.html

Google is making waves in the social networking pond this morning with an as-yet-unofficial announcement about a new site-independent API, OpenSocial, that aims to make it easier to connect your profile and friends across social networks.

OpenSocial is a set of APIs that will allow independent developers to build applications that run on any participating network, using the data stored by that network. Partners in OpenSocial fall into two distinct groups: the social networks and the developers building outside apps.

Techcrunch, which posted the first details of the announcement, claims that OpenSocial’s hosts, or the participating social networks, include Google’s Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle (for those wondering what Oracle is doing on that list, the company recently unveiled Oracle Events, which is a social network of sorts).

Developers include some names you might recognize from Facebook’s platform, including Flixster, iLike, RockYou and Slide, all of which have successful Facebook apps.

OpenSocial consists of three APIs which are designed to allow developers access to common functions and data in social networks:

Profile Information (your personal data)
Friends Information (relationships within the host network)
Activities (Events, postings, news feeds etc)

OpenSocial will use various existing programming languages to facilitate access to the APIs — there’s no need to learn yet another language like Facebook Markup, etc. Developers will thus be able to build once and deploy on any participating host network.

A few pressing matters haven’t been outlined so far in the unofficial news of OpenSocial, namely how privacy is handled and can anyone build an app. Judging by how the rest of the API seems to be designed privacy and access control will likely be in the hands of the host network. As for who can create apps, that seems to still be up in the air. Given the success of APIs like those at Flickr or Google Maps, it seems likely that the OpenSocial APIs will be available to anyone who wants to use them.[Update: I spoke with John McCrea, VP of Marketing at Plaxo, and he reports that, yes, anyone can build an app]

Many pundits have been saying that OpenSocial means trouble for the Facebook Platform and the coming-soon MySpace Platform, but that’s not necessarily true. There’s nothing to stop Facebook from adopting OpenSocial and leveraging its tools.

We think it’s far more likely we’ll see pigs sprout wings, but it could happen. Rather than a competitor to Facebook, Google’s OpenSocial simply reveals the limitations and lock-in of Facebook for what they are — an attempt to corral and control your data and limit outside developers.

Although it isn’t live yet, the new OpenSocial API information will reportedly live here and is expected to be online sometime later this week.

OpenSocial opens new can of worms, By Caroline McCarthy

Lee Hill — 2007-11-03T07:21:22-05:00

When Google announced that its new social-networking initiative would extend to any site that wanted to participate, the land grab for the social Web's attention just got a whole lot more intense.

In a move that was anticipated for weeks, Google has unveiled

a set of application program interfaces

(APIs) that allow third-party programmers to build widgets that take advantage of personal data and profile connections on a social-networking site. But instead of limiting the project to its own social-networking property, Orkut, Google has invited other sites along for the ride--including LinkedIn, Hi5, Plaxo, Ning, and Friendster.

The initiative, appropriately, is called "OpenSocial." It's a clear contrast to Facebook, the social-networking site that became the talk of the tech world when it announced the opening of its developer platform in May but has kept developer activity restricted to its own service (and has since

signed an exclusive ad deal with Microsoft in exchange for an equity investment

, likely snubbing Google in the process). When other social networks began to announce their own "platform strategies" this fall, concerns were raised that developers would have to create a completely new application for each site. That could prove inefficient and costly, especially for smaller developers working on a shoestring budget.

OpenSocial, should it prove successful, would change that entirely. "At its highest level, Google is a company that is dependent upon having a great Web platform," said Joe Kraus, Google's director of product management, in an interview with CNET News.com. "This announcement is about making the Web better."

Creators of third-party applications are understandably optimistic. "In a lot of ways this is the greatest thing that could've happened to us," said Ali Partovi, CEO of social music site iLike. "We've already been very successful with that strategy on Facebook, but then spreading to every other social network out there without an open standard would be much more expensive, harder to justify, and harder to prioritize."

Executives at the social networks participating in OpenSocial were equally enthused. "We're in a period of time when we're realizing that social Web stuff isn't just fun, it's really fundamental," said John McCrea, vice president of marketing at Plaxo. "What we're seeing in walled gardens like Facebook and MySpace is an attempt to create a Web operating system, so there's been all this talk over the past six months about platforms...By supporting these OpenSocial APIs, we can carve out real estate that can be populated with any sorts (of applications)."

Notably absent from OpenSocial is MySpace, which has announced early-stage plans for a developer platform strategy and already has its advertisements served by Google. "We would love MySpace to be a part of it," Google's Kraus said, but declined to say why the News Corp.-owned social-networking site--or Facebook, for that matter--is not part of the deal.

MySpace representatives declined to comment.

Multiple sources who spoke to CNET News.com both on and off the record hinted that we will, indeed, only see the tip of the OpenSocial iceberg when it's formally unveiled on Thursday night. The RSS technology behind Google Reader, for example, was rumored to be the engine behind a super-powered "social news feed" akin to Facebook's. But that's potentially on the way. "Orkut is the first customer of OpenSocial on the Google side," Kraus explained. "We think there are opportunities to make Gmail and iGoogle more social as well," he said, but declined to elaborate.

Even before OpenSocial launches, there's already plenty of speculation as to how else the program could expand from its initial incarnation. "Their missing element is social search," pointed out Gartner analyst Ray Valdes. "That's not part of the APIs right now and Google doesn't really have a social search engine in the same way that Facebook has."

Or Google could leverage its new partnerships with information-rich social media sites to boost its AdSense advertising program, especially considering that Facebook is

planning to move into the sector

. "All that information that they're getting from those social networks, they could use that for an upgraded model of AdSense," suggested AllFacebook blogger Nick O'Neill.

But as the OpenSocial overseer, working through partnerships rather than its usual strategy of acquisitions, Google might not have quite as much power as it's used to. "Partnerships can certainly be very efficient," said RedMonk analyst Stephen O'Grady, who specializes in open-source technology. "They can also be very challenging. You're trying to get a bunch of different firms with competing interests to try to go along. Coalitions of this sort can be problematic over time."

It could also mean some rather un-Googly red tape. The individual social-networking sites are responsible for getting their own arms of the project up and running, and exactly when that will happen is by no means clear. Friendster users, for example, won't see any OpenSocial widgets until at least the beginning of December, and LinkedIn representatives told CNET News.com that while developer activity will begin soon, the full presence of the new platform won't be felt until early 2008.

Additionally, some of the OpenSocial participants have not abandoned their existing in-house platform strategies. "We have our own developer program," Friendster Vice President of Marketing David Jones said. "(Developers) will be able to use either Friendster's platform or OpenSocial...We already have hundreds signed up for the Friendster developer program." Jones added that Friendster's own platform will launch on November 30, before its OpenSocial integration does.

Then there's the Curse of the Zombie (or Vampire, or Pirate). By opting into OpenSocial, a social-networking site may find itself at odds with users who find embeddable applications to be distracting at best and spam-worthy at worst. This is especially pertinent to sites like Plaxo and LinkedIn, which promote themselves as productivity tools rather than ways to "

poke

" your friends. "In some ways, any of these different attempts to mash up between a property and things created by a vibrant developer community does open Pandora's box," said Plaxo's McCrea. "I think certainly, the results to date for Facebook are mixed because of some of those overly viral applications."

Adam Nash, LinkedIn's senior director of product, emphasized that Google is allowing participating social networks to decide just how open they want their OpenSocial platforms to be. "(OpenSocial) doesn't change the fact that we truly have no interest in zombie biting and food fights on LinkedIn," he emphasized. "In order to be in the LinkedIn directory, we will have some set of standards."

"I can't say that there will be no risks here," McCrea said. "I think we're in an early phase of the social Web, and it's an experimental phase, so I think we'll be learning as we go."

CNET News.com's Elinor Mills contributed to this story.

Google Announces the OpenSocial API, Brady Forrest

Lee Hill — 2007-11-03T07:08:20-05:00

Google has announced OpenSocial, a new open API for social networks. The new standard will allow developers to create Facebook-like apps on any social network site that implements it with the same calls.

The open API will have three parts

People
Storage
Activity stream

All of these calls will have a GData counterpart and they will use HTML and Javascript only. Google is considering adding OAuth (Radar post) to the API.

On Thursday the following links should go live:

http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial -- the documentation for OpenSocial
http://sandbox.orkut.com - a sandbox for testing apps

Google's launch partners are hi5, iLike, Slide, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Ning and SixApart (the largest). Check out Techmeme, Techcrunch, and the New York Times for more coverage.

Google will be holding the first of their developer CampFires at the GooglePlex this Friday to explain OpenSocial. A CampFire is Google's new method of disseminating information to developers. These events will be invite-only and will include about thirty developers. Video of the event will be available in the days following.

Google's OpenSocial API will gain traction with a lot of social networks, but I doubt that we will see Facebook or MySpace supporting it. Both are large enough to require their own API. I'll be curious to see how each site extends the OpenSocial API and how that affects adoption and app creation.

Graphing social patterns with Linkedin’s Reid Hoffman by Dan Farber, ZDNet

Lee Hill — 2007-10-09T08:29:48-05:00

Story

Speaking the Graphing Social Patterns conference (covering the business and technology of Facebook) in San Jose today, Linkedin founder and chairman Reid Hoffman poured cold water on the notion that a single social graph would prevail. “One graph that includes all types of relationships in one perfectly orchestrated universe is a geek, blogger dream. It’s not mass market,” Hoffman said. “The amount of effort in building and maintaining it is hard. It may be important to have different baseline rules for different brands and different networks.”

“The simple misconception is that any communications infrastructure can be used for anything. The question is what is the use case. The interesting overlap is public profile presence in search engines and the potential business applications that can be built on the social graph,” he added.

Just as one Web site cannot be all things to all people, and there won’t be one graph binding them all, Hoffman said. “Diversity is part of what makes the ecosystem good and interesting for consumers.”

Hoffman, who is also an investor in Facebook, explained how Facebook and Linkedin offer different use cases. Linkedin is about affecting business and has more context than Facebook around that use, he said. Linkedin, for example, recently introduced photos to its site (head shots of members), but not photo sharing. Similarly, Linkedin Answers is more tied to professional reputation and providing expertise compared to the more general Facebook answer applications.

The Facebook messaging and communications platform is about sharing, and Linkedin is about brokering business relationships, meeting someone you don’t know and finding professional connections, services and jobs, Hoffman said.

Of course, Facebook is still in its infancy and could grow up to create a branch for business users. The company is expected to announce soon that members will be able to categorize relationships, e.g., friends, family, business.

Hoffman was asked about linkage between his business-oriented social networking site and Facebook. He paused for a moment and said, “We are going to probably going to provide some apps on Facebook. We have one–My Company is Hiring–but it has no traction.”

“We will provide professional apps to the degree the audience wants them. It depends on how much energy or investment they are worth,” he added. “Our interest is in making sure people can make themselves effective day-by-day and week-by-week.”

“You can’t just build random applications for it. I would speculate from other parties not having done Facebook apps yet, it is less about fear and more about return on investment.” He noted that there are big niche opportunities for entrepreneurs given that large companies can only launch two or three interesting businesses a year.

I asked Hoffman about APIs that would open up Linkedin’s platform for developers, which he mentioned when I talked to him June. He said that APIs would be forthcoming but did not say when.

Facebook’s platform is unique among social networks in the way it allows developers to acquire customers, leverage key relationships and leverage the existing communications scheme to build interesting applications, Hoffman said. However, as reported in O’Reilly’s report on the Facebook Platform, 87 percent of the usage goes to only 84 Facebook applications, and only 45 applications exceed 100,000 active users.

Facebook and other social networks work because the patterns of important relationships you have in real life are manifest on the Web and in the case of Facebook empowered by useful applications. “If you can import relationships that matter and enables applications, you can change peoples lives,” Hoffman said.

Hoffman pointed out that communications and entertainment applications, such as those from Slide, RockYou and Facebook, are the biggest. Future possibilities for successful applications would include iterations of major use cases today, he said, and those that would be useful in a one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many environment with your friends.

Hoffman also pointed to Facebook photo sharing as a best case of what the new pattern of communications looks like and Web discovery through friends and sharing as a future direction for search.

He expects that new entrepreneurs from college will first write Facebook applications, mostly around social entertainment. The challenge for developers will be constantly creating something new to keep people coming back for more.

He noted that the Facebook Platform is a microcosm of the Web. “Rising above the noise is more difficult because it is so easy to write applications,” Hoffman said. “What hasn’t worked so far [on Facebook] is business, politics and money. A challenge for developers is the “second act” the economics of the Web.

“What is still up in the air is the establishment of new use cases and major applications. Anything you try to charge for someone else will give away as way to acquire customers. At least three people will try to copy whatever works,” Hoffman said. The key factors are how to get distribution, usage, retention and some economic return, he stated.

According to Lance Tokuda of Facebook application developer RockYou, only one percent of Facebook applications succeed in getting distribution of any consequence. That said, Tokuda also said that Facebook is seven times better than MySpace as a distribution platform.

Barack Obama, Social Networking King by Jose Antonio Vargas, Washington Post

Lee Hill — 2007-10-08T08:58:21-05:00

Go to the story.

Online, Barack Obama is king of social networking.

Which is not to say that he's the most popular candidate on social networking sites. (Start deleting those angry comments now, Ron Paul fans.) He's just the busiest soc-net bee of the lot. The first to capitalize on the strength of his Facebook groups. The first to have a profile on Eons, the MySpace for baby boomers. One of the first candidates -- the other being Rudy Guiliani -- to have a profile on LinkedIn, a site for professional networkers, and the first to have a LinkedIn group.

And as of Friday, he's the first candidate to have profiles on BlackPlanet.com and MiGente.com, popular soc-nets in the black and Latino communities, and also on newer soc-nets such as AsianAve.com (for Asian Americans) and GLEE.com ("GLEE" stands for "Gay, Lesbian and Everyone Else").

For a biracial candidate who grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia and has lived in New York and Chicago -- and who's touted himself as someone who can unite Americans -- this kind of outreach makes sense. "At Obama events across the country what is noticeable is the diversity of the crowd and the unique level of energy from groups of people who may not have attended a political event for any other candidate in the past," Obama spokeswoman Jen Psaki told The Trail.

But to some online observers, this might seem like overkill, a variation on the let's-throw-spaghetti-on-the-online-wall-and-see-what-sticks strategy -- a criticism bestowed upon John Edwards
earlier this year. To many, it's simply smart online-politicking. Yes, we live in a MySpace-Facebook populated online world, but outside of those gigantic hubs, they argue, are dynamic soc-nets effectively targeting demographics.

"This is 2007, not 2004. Back in 2004, the strategy was, get them to your Web site. That was the goal," said David Weinberger, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and Internet adviser for Howard Dean. "These days, the Web is a much busier, fragmented, diverse world, and while these social networking sites are still really in their infancy, it's hard to resist their value in reaching people."

Added Colin Delaney of epolitics.com: "These sites don't require much maintaining, especially considering Obama's new media team. Fact is, online you have to go where the audience is, and the online audience are on all these sites."

LinkedIn Companion for Firefox

Lee Hill — 2007-09-28T13:34:12-05:00

The Firefox Companion brings you immediate access to your LinkedIn network as you browse and read email.

Key features:

- See LinkedIn profiles for anyone sending you Web email
- Search your LinkedIn network from any web site
- Bookmark profiles and searches for easy access
- Find a job by seeing who in your network can connect you to hiring managers while you browse major on line job websites

Analysis: Social Networks May Become Interoperable by J. Nicholas Hoover, InformationWeek

Lee Hill — 2007-09-24T10:01:42-05:00

Go to story.

Ever since Facebook opened its platform earlier this year so third parties could offer "applications" that users could install as widgets on their Facebook homepages, the company has been hailed as a forward-thinking revolutionary. Other social networks are following similar strategies, and in the end it could make for a more extensible and portable ecosystem of social networks.

LinkedIn and IBM, for example, intend to make it easier for users to access their social networks from other Web services and applications. Multiple services on the Internet, among them Google-sponsored Socialstream, claim to be able to allow users to post content and then syndicate it to a variety of social networks where the poster may have a profile. LiveJournal already supports single-sign-on system OpenID. IBM's even talking with "a lot of the major social networks," presumably including Facebook and MySpace, to see how they might work together and share information with one another.

But social networks are a long way from standardizing features and communication, which may be a necessary step for widespread sharing of information. The haphazard scaffolding of social networking means there are no cross-network standards for profiles, for feeds of information coming from users' contacts, or for the way "friending" someone is handled.

Even the very definition of a social network isn't exactly perfect. They typically contain profiles, some ability for a user to connect themselves to others, some search functionality, and the ability to communicate with other users. However, that's not always the case.

Meanwhile, Facebook, as well as some of the other social networks, are relatively closed to the outside world. Everything there happens within a Facebook bubble where any communication has to happen between registered Facebook users. Facebook profiles aren't fully indexed by Google.

There are certainly possibilities. Something like Microsoft's CardSpace could act as a cross-authentication mechanism, while OpenID could be a single sign-on. RSS could be the standard for feeds of information. Still, even if the technical challenges are solved, there's a bigger sociological and privacy hurdle. And there may always be the tricky problem of Web identity -- you can still be a dog and have nobody know it on the Internet.

For now, Plaxo's Pulse might be an indication of where social networks are headed: user control. Plaxo puts the user at the center, basing the network on Outlook contacts rather than who's a member of the network and includes feeds of information from places like Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Amazon wishlists, and LiveJournal postings. The company even recently introduced a LinkedIn synchronization and de-duplication service for its own platform, allowing the Plaxo rolodex to grow with a user's LinkedIn contact list.

Stan Relihan's Conversation with a LION

Lee Hill — 2007-09-17T11:16:25-05:00

Episode 2 of Stan Relihan's new audio Podcast series, 'Connections', is now online at: http://connections.thepodcastnetwork.com

This week, Stan talk to Christian Mayaud, currently #11 of all 13 Million LinkedIn users & founder of the LinkedIn LIONs.

He's a Venture Capitalist whose Rolodex formed part of the nucleus of initial LinkedIn members - setting the scene for the high calibre of users today. http://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=98061

The a:c Responds To Barack Obama

Lee Hill — 2007-09-12T05:34:19-05:00

Democratic presidential candidate Baraq Obama has taken to LinkedIn's Answers to ask the question: How can the next president better help small business and entrepreneurs thrive?

Here is our response to Obama: + 'Get' technology and have a curiosity about it. Recent US Presidents and national politicians in general don't seem to care or know much of anything about technology. "The Internets" and "The Google" have become punch lines. A president who follows technology can make more informed policy decisions. The lobbies that represent the interests of the auto industry in Detroit and the oil interests of Texas seem to have had far more pull in Washington than the interests of Silicon Valley. It's time to change that.

+ Along these lines the biotech industry in the US has been frustrated because the current administration in a number of cases has hamstrung progress citing religious values (stem cell research stands out). Washington needs to regain its respect for science.

Facebook Could Challenge Google And Become The Remote Control For The Web, Posted by Stephen Wellman

Lee Hill — 2007-08-21T14:18:48-05:00

Last month, I argued that Facebook posed a challenge to professional networking site LinkedIn. While I stand by that assessment, I think that in that post I didn't go far enough. Given just how fast Facebook's API program is growing, Facebook may present an even more interesting challenge to the Web. Facebook could shape up as a rival to Google, Yahoo, and even search itself.

InformationWeek Story

Playground mentality comes to the (LinkedIn) office, Jessica Guynn, Chronicle Staff Writer

Lee Hill — 2007-08-21T14:16:20-05:00

Four square is also a popular social activity at LinkedIn. After scooter races, basketball and Whiffle ball flopped as company sports contenders, the Mountain View online service that connects professionals kicked off afternoon four square bouts on a back parking lot.

"Different people had different recollections of the different rules they played by in elementary school," said Chris Saccheri, 30-year-old LinkedIn director of Web development. "So we made it up as we went along."

Four square has become so popular that in May, when LinkedIn hosted a lunch for fellow geeks at its offices, the company handed out four square balls sporting the company logo.

Now the competition seems to be heating up. Mountain View-based job search engine SimplyHired recently challenged LinkedIn to a four square match.

San Fransisco Chronicle Story

Alexa's Traffic Graph For LinkedIn.com

Lee Hill — 2007-08-13T12:13:03-05:00

Spock's Search For Earthlings, By Scott Gilbertson

Lee Hill — 2007-08-09T13:53:24-05:00

Spock, a new people oriented search engine unveiled its public beta today, but the test seems to be off to a shaky start. At the moment the site times out for most requests, probably due to the massive amount of press and inbound links the release has generated.

With a bit of patience you might be able to get the site to load, or bookmark it for later because Spock already has the gushers gushing.

Like Wink and other people-oriented search sites, Spock isn’t so much interested in documents about people, as you would get when searching Google, but the actual people themselves. Spock’s spiders attempt to crawl the net and then its algorithms aggregate all the data about you into one spot.

The result, in those cases where Spock makes a correct match, are simultaneously impressive — a complete portrait of your total web presence — and thoroughly creepy. When Spock was first announced earlier this year a number of people snickered that stalk would be a better name.

But the truth is, that’s killing messenger. All the data Spock crawls is already out there, but you may be in for a shock the first time you see it all in one place.

Pulling data from social networks — MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and others — Spock then condenses and extracts what it considers the most important information about you — namely your occupation and age, though depending on what you’ve listed on your various accounts, it may have even more details.

From the search results profiles you can then click through to vote for whether or not the information is correct, visit the relevant profile page or add tags to people. Just about anyone can edit information on just about any entry.

If you sign up for Spock, you can claim and manage your own entry or create one if Spock doesn’t yet know about you.

Aside from the slow servers, Spock looks as though it might be genuinely useful — if nothing else it might serve as a wake call for those who don’t realize how little privacy they have left themselves.

Go to Scott's blog entry.

Hitwise Intelligence : Facebook and LinkedIn: The Line between Social and Professional Networking

Lee Hill — 2007-08-08T16:32:42-05:00

<p>Gmail</p>

While the sharp increase of Facebook in the Australian market is of extreme interest - the social networking utility moved into the top 20 websites visited in All Categories w/ending 28 July 2007 - the referral traffic between Facebook and LinkedIn, a tool for managing professional relationships, gives further insight into the scope of networking activity on Facebook.

Firstly - a chart tracking the growth of Facebook against MySpace and Bebo, where you’ll see that Facebook overtook Bebo for the first time in July 07:

In this chart here you'll see LinkedIn's downstream website traffic to Facebook increasing dramatically in the past quarter. In contrast, LinkedIn's referrals to MySpace and Bebo have either trended down or remained stagnant.

From this chart, I would begin to speculate that users are a) looking-up the professional details of friends and acquaintances from Facebook on LinkedIn or b) business-oriented in visiting both networks concurrently. I wouldn't go so far as to back up this BusinessWeek article which speculates that users could soon replace LinkedIn entirely with Facebook; Hitwise Clickstream data also indicates an increasing amount of traffic in the opposite direction from Facebook to LinkedIn.

Hitwise Demographics data lends some evidence to the argument that business users are accessing both networks. The bubble chart below shows in the top right-hand quadrant that LinkedIn and Facebook are both highly-indexed in the Mosaic Group A - Leading Lifestyles, the wealthiest segment online, and Group D - Fashionably Wired, who are young affluent singles and sharers enjoying city life. The size of the bubble indicates the likelihood of the group being comprised of professionals; the highest groups being Fashionably Wired with an index of 175 and Leading Lifestyles with 171.

Professionals turning to online communities to make business contacts, By Maureen McDonald

Lee Hill — 2007-08-07T10:08:27-05:00

Whenever Kerry Doman heads to a bar after work, she takes her favorite companion, a Dell laptop, with her. She orders a Diet Coke and then logs into to a suite of online networking sites.

Within minutes, the founder and CEO of Detroit-based After5 L.L.C. has cruised myspace.com, linkedin.com and facebook.com while eyeballing the patrons milling about.

“What I'm looking to do is drive people to my Web site, www.after5detroit.com. It is as easy as a click of a button when people meet me through Internet networks,” Doman said, noting she receives 25,000 visitors a month at her site. “Everything I do involves ways to invite friends, link friends, encourage people to participate in After5's events.”

Soon, nearly every professional will have an online profile, a virtual billboard to showcase their face, their talents and competitive strengths, said Kay Luo, director of corporate communication for the Palo Alto, Calif.-based linkedin.com. She helps shepherd one of the largest online business-networking sites, with 102,000 members in the Detroit area and 12 million members globally.

Virtual business networking helps Keith Stonehouse, vice president of Franklin Title Agency in Rochester, raise money for his favorite charities and recruit referrals that wouldn't necessarily come from singing the national anthem at Rotary meetings.

But others insist face-to-face interactions, “hello-my-name-is” badge in place, still hold a vital place in small-business marketing.

“In my experience the online business networks are one-dimensional. Anyone can present anything they want, and there's no way to validate or invalidate if true,” said Doron York, president and CEO of Business Edge International, a leadership coaching company in Bloomfield Hills, who is a member of LinkedIn and Zananetwork.com, a Farmington Hills-based online referral network launched in June.

While York seldom leaves home without his BlackBerry and laptop, he is more inclined to check e-mails from trusted associates and family members than his networks. “You expose yourself to billions of members — a glorified Yellow Pages. You have no ties to these circles,” he said.

But Americans are spending more time online and conducting more commerce online. Omniture Inc., an Orem, Utah-based provider of online business software, recorded 1.4 trillion transactions in 2007 with clients such as eBay, AOL, Wal-Mart and Microsoft, and a company spokesman expects 2 trillion online interactions in 2007.

Along with the big players, thousands of business professionals seek to make their presence known among colleagues and potential customers.

Stonehouse sends regular announcements to his e-mail roster notifying them of in-person networking events, including his own monthly martini group for young business people called Tempus Networking.

“At least half of my business comes from online, out-of-the-box networking, but it is important to have live events as well,” Stonehouse said. “Most other networking groups ask you to make a one-minute speech about yourself. We ask people to take ties off, have a martini and relax while sharing business cards.”

When it comes to online networking, he finds it a fast medium for commercial trade. “If you show people a benefit, remind them of options, people will click with you right away; you are in the same virtual medium,” he said.

After doing business, he makes a database entry for every contact. Contractors, real estate agents, builders and potential home buyers are all grist for the title insurance mill. For any request, he can refer business to his online network of professional associates assembled on the Troy-based networkpods.com. He has a custom profile page that acts as an interactive brochure.

He also maintains a presence on linkedin.com, where users have free access to basic information and pay $19.95 to $200 a month to see something beyond the superficial billboard.

“The first thing I do when I wake up and last thing I do at night is check my business networks,” Stonehouse said.

Elizabeth Blondy, owner of Canine to Five and Detroit Dog Daycare Inc. in Detroit, uses myspace.com to arrange singles events at her Midtown facility. “I can use the search tools to send invitations to just gay men,” Blondy said, noting that she produces separate events for gay and straight singles and posts separate billboards for each interest group.

“We hook the twentysomethings who are addicted to myspace; they wouldn't know of us otherwise,” Blondy said. She makes a point of checking e-mails hourly and her myspace page daily.

Denise Roberts, president of Waterford Township-based D.A. Roberts & Associates, a network and sales-coaching company, says the most effective business owners strike a balance between online business networks and live events.

“Networking is all about building trusted relationships. Virtual networking helps leverage and extend your reach, while physical meetings offer genuine communication,” Roberts said. She is a member of the National Association of Women Business Owners of Greater Detroit, a Business Networking International chapter in Troy and several other groups.

Groups such as BNI teach people to perfect a one-minute speech that describes how an individual's service or store could help other members.

A potential network of successful small-business owners across the world enticed Chris McCuiston to become a beta tester for zananetwork.com, started by industrialist Howard Keating and run out of Grace & Wild Inc.'s studios in Farmington Hills.

McCuiston and his wife, Jenny Vanker McCuiston, own Goldfish Swim School in Birmingham, and teach children and young teens how to swim. “I log onto the network forums to get help with human resource issues,” he said.

Zananetwork was designed to meet the entrepreneurial needs of the McCuistons and similar businesses. “The key design is to match up people looking for the same thing through a social-business network,” said Keating, the CEO. “You can operate from your house and be a global company.”

McCuiston can work from a small office in a running suit, asking questions of his network as they crop up instead of putting on khakis and a dress shirt for formal meetings on a monthly basis.

“With zananetwork I can log on to the forum any time of day or night, detail out my situation and get response,” McCuiston added. “My questions involve hiring, documenting and firing. I get help from a controlled environment.”

Crain's Detroit Story

Hitwise Research : LinkedIn 11th Leading Employment Publisher

Lee Hill — 2007-07-27T10:12:00-05:00

In the Hitwise Business and Finance - Employment & Training industry, Seek Australia held the leading position, accounting for 1 in 4 visits during June 2007. MyCareer and CareerOne followed with 8.48% and 7.82% share respectively. Employment social networking website, LinkedIn, ranked at 11th position, enjoyed a 288% increase comparing June 2006 and June 2007. Given the strong uptake of social networking websites by Australian users, it will be increasingly important for recruiters to tap into established user-networks online.

Silicon Valley startup Spock aims to refine people search, By RACHEL KONRAD AP Technology Writer

Lee Hill — 2007-07-21T08:51:38-05:00

A search engine startup promises to deliver more targeted results on queries about people, whether it's your ex-girlfriend, the guy from the bar last night, or Paris Hilton.

The idea is to help you avoid sorting through the thousands of results—the vast majority likely to be irrelevant Web pages—delivered by the major Internet search companies.

Menlo Park-based Spock Inc. scours sites such as News Corp.'s MySpace, Wikipedia, LinkedIn and Yahoo Inc.'s Flickr and compiles biographies of real people—alive, dead, famous or obscure, from New York to New Delhi.

Results often include an individual's photo, age, job title, political or religious affiliations, and research papers or articles written. Members contribute such information about themselves or others, similar to Wikipedia's model of letting anyone contribute to the online encyclopedia regardless of expertise.

Spock is gaining 30,000 new members per week in an invitation-only "beta" test mode. It will launch within a month with a searchable database of 100 million people.

The site relies on public data; if you've never given your age or posted your photo on a blog or other site, that information may not appear on Spock. Nor does the site include information that's stored behind sites that require passwords, such as the popular social-networking site Facebook.

But if you've submitted information to a company or your neighborhood's online newsletter, or if you've used another networking site, including MySpace, Xanga or Ning, you may already be Spocked.

None of Spock's 30 employees is an editor. Computer algorithms police the site: If you post inflammatory or inappropriate items, your user rating plummets. Everything users add or delete can be traced back—nothing is anonymous.

To highlight the ingenuity of Spock, co-founder and CEO Jaideep Singh searched for "Boxer." On Google, the top result is dogs—specifically the American Kennel Club site. On Amazon.com, it's underwear. On Spock, it's biographies of California Sen. Barbara Boxer and former World Heavyweight Champion Muhammad Ali.

Actually, it's time to be more serious about social networking

Lee Hill — 2007-07-18T20:10:40-05:00

I read Dan's post (below, hopefully, but here's a link just in case this post has wandered off on its own) and thought I'd take issue. Sorry, Dan. Actually, I'm not disagreeing with Dan - after all, he is right on the money. I'm not too sure I want the IWR readers and contributors group on Facebook to know exactly how many chocolate chip muffins I ate this afternoon - that's something for my friends to know, although possibly not the colleagues over the desk from me who wondered where the last one went.

But I also think that the line between work and social life is blurred, especially in more recent times. I talk about personal things with my workmates and contacts, and knowing about each other as people always helps to smooth things along. However, the sorts of information people share on Facebook - as Dan has pointed out - are increasingly becoming more intimate.

Yet, my first reaction to reading the post below was: isn't Facebook for professionals actually called LinkedIn? I know it doesn't get much love, and I'm one of thousands who has rather neglected their profile on that site, but frankly, it's there for friends and business contacts that I want to stay in contact with professionally. Facebook is something you share with an inner business circle, because you want to find out how everyone did at Glastonbury, or see the latest pictures of an old workmates' kids.

Then again, there is a reason why LinkedIn isn't necessarily the Facebook Pro of which we seek.

Put simply, these things don't develop in parallel as much as we'd like to believe they do. LinkedIn overlapped with Orkut, which overlapped Friendster, which overlapped with Faceparty, which overlapped with MySpace, which overlapped with Facebook.

Facebook will be replaced in the affections of social networkers some time soon by a newer, shinier toy, something with more bells and whistles, perhaps, or something a little more elegant. Or possibly something that makes the distinction between friends you share everything with, and business acquaintances you'd like to share certain things with. I don't know. LinkedIn survived as a popular cause for a few years, and it'll probably stumble on for a few more, but I'm betting there will be a thinning out of other, weaker, members of the social networking circle some time soon.

I also know one other thing - it's not linear. Orkut still has a huge following in Brazil, for example. LinkedIn is still visited. Will the last person in at Plaxo.com please turn out the lights? Which brings us to another point I've only just stumbled across. I can't remember the last time I visited Plaxo, and yet it has a couple of hundred business contacts of mine on file. I need to wipe them right away.

Move Over MySpace, Sites Mean Business by By JOE BEL BRUNO, The Associated Press

Lee Hill — 2007-07-18T10:05:37-05:00

Get the whole story.

LinkedIn, and other business networking Web sites, allow for more relevant contacts and more private communications. They allow business people to share their network of contacts with others and share their contacts in return.

And that's exactly what Reid Hoffman envisioned when he and four others launched LinkedIn in 2003. The ad-driven Web site is now growing by about 700,000 new users each month, and is considered to be the model for a growing trend of business-oriented networking sites. Management said the privately-owned company is profitable, and revenue has doubled year-to-date.

The 1,294 contacts on Hoffman's LinkedIn profile read like a who's who of Silicon Valley elite _ everyone from Internet executives to venture capitalists. Users on the site who know Hoffman, or become one of his contacts, would have access to those names _ and vice versa. On LinkedIn, members have to accept contacts _ and unlock their lists to others they have approved.

"At this point, if you come in and upload your address book and connect with people that are here, it doesn't take much experimenting," he said. "You can be off to the races immediately, and that's one of the benefits of being at a scale of 12 million people."

Trade associations have long used the Internet to connect members within a particular industry. However, sites using social networking software allow them to post details on a profile, and use it to directly communicate and access information.

"For many people, these sites will mirror the way we behave off-line," said Steven Jones, a professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago who specializes in new media.

One popular niche is linking investors, allowing online traders to boast about a shrewd trade or a hot stock tip, like the traders do on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

LinkedIn Traffic Up 323% in Past Year, Users More Likely to be on Gmail by LeeAnn Prescott @ HitWise

Lee Hill — 2007-07-17T09:51:56-05:00

Have you been getting a flurry in LinkedIn invitations in the past few months? I have been receiving a few requests a week, so I wasn't surprised to find that the market share of US visits to LinkedIn was up 323% in the past year (week ending 7/7/07 vs week ending 7/8/06), and up 17% in the past four weeks alone (week ending 7/7/07 vs week ending 6/8/07). As of last week, LinkedIn ranked at #23 in the Hitwise Employment and Training category.

There's more...

Forget MySpace, Facebook Is A Bigger Threat To LinkedIn, Stephen Wellman, InformationWeek

Lee Hill — 2007-07-12T13:43:37-05:00

When it comes to social networking, it seems everyone is obsessed with Facebook. The big meme du jour is that Facebook will soon surpass MySpace as the biggest social networking site on the Web. Frankly, I don't think this is an interesting question. Regardless of who wins this race, both sites have amazing growth numbers and don't seem poised for a downturn anytime soon. The more interesting question is this: Will Facebook kill LinkedIn to become the primary career networking site on the Web?

When I look at Facebook, I see a social networking site perfectly designed to capture professionals from cradle to grave. Facebook's heavy emphasis on college students and do-gooders has given it a lock on the middle class and upwardly mobile demographics.

LinkedIn is a social networking site designed to capture the same demographic. But it faces two big limitations. It's not big with college students and given LinkedIn's stripped down format, it doesn't offer any multimedia or graphics to appeal to them.

Facebook has just the right amount of bling. It's not as overdone or kludgy as MySpace, but it has enough graphics and video for both college kids and 40-year-old professionals. And that's a killer combo.

Regardless of what you think of Danah Boyd's recent class analysis of the two social networking sites, she does get a thing or two right. Unless you're a musician or an artist of some kind, you don't use MySpace to advance your career. You probably use LinkedIn for business networking and, if my personal experience is any barometer, your LinkedIn connections are all rapidly going over to Facebook (and sending you invites along the way).

If you are a college student you probably use Facebook and there is a chance that you also use MySpace. But once you graduate, I suspect you'll stick with Facebook and ditch MySpace, especially once you settle into your first job.

And if you're a graduate student (especially in business school or law school), you probably use both Facebook and LinkedIn. And if the majority of your LinkedIn connections migrate over to Facebook, you will probably stop using LinkedIn at some point in the near future.

What do you think? Will Facebook kill LinkedIn? Will it become the primary social networking tool for professionals? Or is there a place at the table for both Facebook and LinkedIn?

New world of networking, by Clare Dight, The Times Online

Lee Hill — 2007-07-12T13:41:56-05:00

The popularity of social networking sites shows no sign of receding, and business networking sites such as LinkedIn.com have established the internet as a way to shake hands elec-tronically with new contacts. Such is the hype around Web 2.0 that more and more specialist sites are springing up. So could tapping into an online community help you to find your next job?

The website i-resign.com started nine years ago as a hobby, a place to post jokes and famous resignation letters. It now serves about 15 million page impressions a year and has some seriously useful content for jobseekers. Registered members who intend to leave their job, post the details of the role, relevant contacts and the date that they are going to quit.

“Everybody knows about the regular job boards, but there is a whole market of hidden, unadvertised jobs and we think that posting these resignations is complementary to official job boards and classifieds,” says Kauser Kanji, the website’s general manager.

“People post their job up because they know that they are probably going to help someone else to find a job,” he says. “It all sounds very altruistic, but I think that’s the way it works. We don’t entirely understand it because we don’t incentivise or pay anybody to post their job up, but we get some 6,000 people a month telling us [that they are leaving their jobs].”

Laura who works for one of the Big Four accountancy and professional services firms, has signed up as a “mole” with TheCareerMole.com. The website seeks to market personal referrals by putting jobseekers in touch with moles within a firm where they would like to work. The job hunter gains inside information about a particular company and the mole gets a financial bonus for a successful hire under their company’s referral bonus scheme.

“It’s quite good to have a big say in who you might be working with,” says Laura, who wishes to remain anonymous. While she is yet to refer a prospective colleague, she has no qualms about doing so in the future. After reading a candidate’s CV, she envisages e-mailing them to build up a rapport and then allowing her firm to vet the person through the traditional hiring process. “You can get a good idea of what someone is like by e-mail,” she says.

It’s a win-win for both parties, according to the website’s co-founder, Kristian Hall. “Employers can reduce recruitment costs and improve employee retention by getting referrals from people they trust – the best possible filter. Employees, or moles, will be rewarded for referring quality candidates as well as gaining kudos from the boss for engaging in recruitment.”

And how do employers feel about social networking sites? The professional services firm Deloitte has a number of moles listed on TheCareerMole, says Sarah Shillingford, its graduate recruitment partner. But she says that the firm would not pay a referral bonus for a hire made in this way. Deloitte is also using the social networking site Facebook.com to put students in touch with others who have taken part in the company’s scholarship or internship programme. It is not alone: the mobile communications firm T-Mobile has invited its new graduate intake to join a dedicated group on Facebook to “meet” each other.

It’s slightly different from websites such as TheCareerMole, says Shillingford. The firm prefers employees to get involved in recruitment activities formally organised by the company or by recommending friends or family, rather than setting up their own recruitment network. “[It’s] not something we want employees spending their time doing, especially when they should be doing client work,” she says.

LinkedIn : Answers : In Europe, what are the blogger's equivalents (search for weblogs) for Technorati, Digg, Delicious, et al?

Lee Hill — 2007-07-10T12:48:12-05:00

A few days ago I posed this question to LinkedIn users. Their answers may interest you.

"In Europe, what are the blogger's equivalents for Technorati, Digg, Delicious, et al? "

You can hardly see Europe as one in this situation. First of all - lots of europeans actually use the services you mention. Those who don't will likely not use anything, or use a local - country specific - service. Language barriers tend to dictate that either you launch in english - or in your native language. As almost all countries in Europe have their own language the result will be - a country specific service.

Messages from Gunnar Langemark

The best way to know what blogs your industry is surveying would be to immerse yourself into their industry. I know from working in Sweden (being able to speak Swedish) that though everyone speaks english, there is a barrier when it comes to communication especially in information sharing. There is not many people that would go on an english blog and write unless that's where their industry is focused. For local companies and people I would recommend getting an "insider" than could ask questions and receive answers for you in the native language.

Take a look at the English blogs, because a lot of times they say the same thing in a different language.

Messages from Oscar Lekande

In Spain meneame is the equivalent to digg, in France you've got wikio ( created by the "famous" Chappaz" ) something of interest you didn't really mention is all blogs networks contact me if you wnat to know moe about our old ...europe :)

Messages from F.Xavier Garcia

In the Netherlands, there are a couple of digg clones: MSN Reporter, NUjij.nl, eKudos.

I'm quite certain that there are more, but I stopped counting after 3 bad ripoffs. You might want to consult with Boris Veldhuizen van Zanten, he knows a lot more about this.

Kerim Satirli also suggests this expert on this topic:

Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

Messages from Kerim Satirli

They are, respectively: Technorati, Digg and Delicious.

If you'd like to find out about european web apps - head to red/writeweb and read their series of articles about international Web markets.

I think that the last one was about Romania, and links to others (Germany, Holland, Poland, Korea, United Kingdom, Russia, Spain, China, Turkey, Italy, Brazil, France, Japan, India, Austria, Sweden, Australia, Hungary, Serbia, Croatia, Latvia, Ireland and Hong Kong) are at the bottom of it.

Links:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_web_apps_in_romania.php

Messages from Michał Olszewski

Being English, working in England, having spent ten years in the US when the internet flowered and blossomed - pretty much those sites you mention. Also - popurls, memeorandum, del.icio.us and so on...

Messages from richard dows

LinkedIn Recruiting Video made by Vcruit.com

Lee Hill — 2007-07-10T09:01:42-05:00


This video was made for LinkedIn.com by Vcruit, a video recruiting firm. If you haven't logged in to sample LinkedIn and want a feel for the site, then take a quick view of this commercial.