The first business plan with social networking features: LinkedIn

January 18, 2005 - 2:32am — bmann

Once I got over my initial enthusiasm with social networking sites, I started saying a simple phrase: social networking is a feature, not a business plan.

From Marc, I see that Reid Hoffman's LinkedIn has jumped full force into jobs. The features? Relationship (follow the connections between you and potential employees/employers), References (people connected to you can give references), and Reputation (displays endorsements for employees/employers).

Great stuff, and the latest graphical updates have made LinkedIn nice looking and very usable.

LinkedIn is the one network that I've stuck with. Many of my earlier complaints about it were that "there's nothing to do there". Well, that's the point. It sits there quietly waiting for the time when you need to search through your business connections.

And maybe one of these days they'll support Canadian ZIP codes. :P

Comments

January 19, 2005 - 9:45pm — addi@www.pjsoft.ca

Agreed.

I had the same feeling a while back - I stopped using Spoke (too complex), Ecademy (too spammy and cluttered), and Ryze (same as Ecademy) - I focused on LinkedIn because it was clean, simple and just worked well... or rather, I was able to work well using LinkedIn.

I've stayed on with Orkut, but that was never meant to be a professional tool by any means... and my activity on that is starting to wane.

Keep up the interesting posts, Boris. I'm thinking of coming up with a plan for a 'use' for Drupal... I'll take my time doing so though. :)

James Addison

http://www.pjsoft.ca

January 20, 2005 - 12:49am — bmann