LinkedIn: Friendster without the gonad-centrism

May 7, 2003 - 10:20am — bmann

Via Boing Boing -- LinkedIn: Friendster without the gonad-centrism

LinkedIn is a new, SixDegrees-style app from Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of PayPal. It's aimed at helping people get work and do deals (a kind of techie bizdev version of the gonad-centric Friendster). I'm still not 100 percent comfortable with explictly affirming (or worse, rejecting) my friendship with others, but these things are irresistable. The interesting thing for me about this is the stats on the geographic and industry dispersion of the sign-ups -- Joi Ito has apparently brought in enough Japanese members to account for 12% of all the members.

I've invited a couple of you in. I'll send out some more invites and try and grow this network. This more business-oriented network seems to make sense -- keep tabs on your contacts, what they're up to, and hopefully pass each other work and/or good people to get in touch with. Check out the LinkedIn website.

Web 2.0

Comments

May 8, 2003 - 1:42pm — bmann

Continuing to add and search

Um. LinkedIn thinks all of Canada is one region. Kind of annoying, but understandable.

Searching through the network (which is really how you find people), I found Andrew Jones of Concursion Technologies. I assume this is someone that Brendon or Evan added. Turns out his web page (the previous link) starts loading, then redirects to a 404 at index-old.shtml.

I think I will try and contact him, to test LinkedIn and to let him know.

Also, searching Google for Concursion Technologies doesn't come back with a link!

May 7, 2003 - 4:26pm — bmann

This is the real scoop

So, I kind of started hooking into LinkedIn without understanding the whol spiel. Russell Beattie does a nice job explaining the LinkedIn concept:

The idea is that you can only see/search the people in YOUR network. This is described in the LinkedIn FAQ: "The network is the group of members who you can contact through the system. You can only contact people who are linked to you through a short chain of members." I was a bit thrown off at first about this because Marc's network is so damn huge and filled with various luminaries in the tech world. But once I got the idea, I was amazed! I'm only one or two trusted connections away from some of these people! THAT is cool!

So, you'll need to actively search/explore the network to figure out what's going on. There is the whole for-pay angle, so we'll see how it works out.

May 7, 2003 - 1:08pm — Gaurav Rampal