LinkedIn Archive

We’ve just received our first batch of limited-edition stickers (thanks Mark!) and are ready to share them with all of you, our great, loyal readers. And to celebrate the printing of the stickers, we’ve launched a new Facebook group and a LinkedIn group which we would love for you to join.

Once you have joined a group, submit your address and a sticker will be shipped to you at no charge! We ship worldwide.

Thank you for continuing to read and support CenterNetworks!

Editor’s note: we won’t be able to reply to each email for a sticker but know that your sticker is on the way!

IT Venture Partner Mark Davis has launched a new group on LinkedIn, "The NY Venture Community Group". In just three days, the group has over 400 people subscribed and a good bit of activity.

Davis explains the purpose for the group, "The New York Venture Community is the LinkedIn group for entrepreneurs, startup teams, venture capitalists and venture service providers in the New York region.  The purpose of this group is to make it easier to 1) find other people in region interested in venture and 2) connect with these people.  Lastly, being part of this group will make it easier for others to find you."

If you are seeking funding now or plan to in the future, you need to be reading Davis’ blog. He has a huge library of information about every facet of the funding process. Frankly I think he should be selling this information because it easily could mean the difference between getting the funding and not.

Pingdom is out with their latest stats regarding downtime for the major social networks for the first 60-ish days in 2008. Bebo leads the list with over 12 hours of downtime after their big downtime in January. We wondered if that downtime was due to the rapid expansion of the Bebo developer platform.

Other notables on the list include Friendster with 6 hours of downtime, LinkedIn at 4 hours, Facebook at 95 minutes and LiveJournal at 10 minutes.

As a side note, these type of blog posts from Pingdom are what I try to explain to new startups all the time. Use your tools to show off your tools. This is something I rarely see and, where applicable, should be on every marketing plan.

LinkedIn has released a new beta version of their site this morning. And to quote Jan, "widget widget widget". Mario from LinkedIn has a good overview of the new features. There’s also new APIs coming soon. Along with the APIs, I’d love to see some new widgets to integrate into a Web site – profile, jobs, etc.

The new home page looks great – an absolute improvement over the old, crusty version. It has a widget feel to it and sure enough it has some widgets that you can move around, add/delete as you wish. The contact viewer is also cleaner than previously. The page feeds very open and airy and a nice 2007 flavor.

They also moved the job board to the home page. Perhaps LinkedIn should look at offering a job board similar to the Job-a-matic board offered by SimplyHired.

If LinkedIn’s goal is to create a more sticky environment, why not partner with a start page provider such as Netvibes or Pageflakes and then you could actually create a very strong business networking environment.  Feeds, travel, etc. — all should be available.

From my perspective, LinkedIn still wins over Facebook for business networking. I get 7-10x more LinkedIn requests than Facebook requests. If you’d link to link me up, check out my profile.

Mike Butcher from TechcrunchUK has a source on a rumor of News Corp. acquiring LinkedIn in 2008. I like this a lot. This makes absolute sense for News Corp who needs to get deeper online and since LinkedIn works for the business crowd and there is some overlap with newspaper readers, this is a deal I can approve.

This is a much better plan than to go after Digg. Except for possible ad revenues, the Digg audience does not match up well against News Corp. But LinkedIn does. It would instantly increase the userbase of LinkedIn and *could* bring some new readers to the WSJ newspaper.

Mike notes, "However, while online revenue is growing it isn’t offsetting the declines in print revenue. So newspapers need another way to monetise their online operations, and social networking – which is eating into classified revenues – is the natural route to take."

Check out our previous LinkedIn coverage including "Are the Most LinkedIn Really LinkedOut?" and our coverage of new Yahoo competitor Kickstart.

(no charge for the Thanksgiving "Gobble" reference)

I have been working on several ventures recently. While these ventures have strong technology components, they are focused on other markets. As such, I’ve been dealing most frequently with people outside of the technology world and through this I’ve confirmed something that I saw hints of previously: the people who are truly the most "linked in" are more often than not the most "linked out."

Let me explain. I’ve been a member of LinkedIn for quite some time. It’s a useful service but I would not consider myself an avid LinkedIn user (the type who wants to "join your network" after a five minute conference call). I do, however, make it a point to connect with trusted business associates. Some of the people I’ve been working with recently are very well-connected (and well-known) in their industries. But typically they’re not on LinkedIn or have very few connections on LinkedIn. It seems that, in non-technology industries in particular, if you’re truly connected, you’re not using LinkedIn. This probably isn’t entirely surprising, but it does highlight the fact that amidst all the hype about online social networking for professionals, at the highest levels of business the physical Rolodex hasn’t lost importance.

Different people may have different reasons for not using services like LinkedIn. Here are a few:

You’re too prominent. If you’re well-known, being on LinkedIn may not be a very attractive proposition for you or your inbox. The value of the service’s utility is probably marginalized by the annoyance of being too accessible to others. For instance, I was disappointed when I couldn’t find Ivanka Trump on LinkedIn, but then I realized that she would almost always receive requests from wannabes as opposed to stand-up businessmen like Drama 2.0.

Your network is too valuable to be exposed publicly. In many ways, you are only as good as your network and it’s not what you know but who you know. Providing a public list of your business associates is probably not appealing to a lot of professionals. While LinkedIn’s privacy controls enable users to make their connections private, there’s not much utility in building a network on LinkedIn for the sake of being able to log in and see who you know.

The people in the highest positions are far too busy to use social networks. While LinkedIn can be a good tool for individuals who need to locate or connect with other professionals (i.e. prospective employers, prospective business partners, etc.), LinkedIn is probably an unnecessary service for many.

Not enough utility is provided. LinkedIn can be useful for locating and connecting with other professionals and is somewhat useful for maintaining relationships with associates you already have relationships with. In addition, the company does offer a suite of premium services. But in my experience, it does seem that a significant number of users use it for little more than "collecting" associates like MySpace users collect friends.

There’s no doubt that LinkedIn is very popular and is well on its way to building a successful company but I think there’s still opportunity for existing professional social networks to improve and for upstarts to compete. A couple of suggestions:

• Maintaining relationships is just as important as making connections. Services that make it easier for professionals to manage their relationships might be more compelling than services that seem focused on listing relationships.
• There may be a place for niche professional social networks that are focused on specific industries. Depending on the industry, these networks might be made invite-only to help ensure privacy and quality.

If nothing else, my recent experiences have reminded me that in a day in age when online social networks get all the attention, the best social networks still are still very much exclusive to the real world. Hopefully as more and more professionals join services like LinkedIn they won’t forget that and they would be wise to also remember that building and maintaining relationships requires more than adding associates to an online list.

This post was contributed by Drama 2.0. I still have no idea who he or she is.

Last night there were reports about Yahoo launching an exciting new tool for students and alumni. Named Kickstart the idea is basically a "connection" source for those looking for a job, hiring or just keeping in touch. With that said, I am bringing out the WTF ALERT.

Someone please help me understand the purpose for this site. It’s a direct competitor to LinkedIn. And it has less functionality which sometimes could be beneficial but not in this case. You create a resume and then "find" others that are associated with the school or companies you have been a part of. But that’s it. No groups. No invites, just search and friend.

Mike Arrington appears to really like the service and notes, "What I liked about the service when I saw a demo last week was the possibility to find a deep database of individuals that went to the same schools that I did." Mike – can’t you do this on LinkedIn?

Barry Schwartz at SearchEngineLand has a screen-by-screen walkthrough of the sign-in process. No idea why but heck I got a chuckle out of it :)

NY Nate wonders WTF he is supposed to do after signing in. And Charlie O’Donnell brings the house down with 5 reasons Kickstart won’t start.

Had Yahoo been smart, they would have approached say the Big Ten or the ACC and signed each school up. This way a base of users would have already been in the program. Instead searching on my MBA school provided me with 2 results and my undergrad provided me with zero. Compare that to LinkedIn where hundreds of connections could be made. Their top 10 speaks mainly to making connections and that’s a great idea but what good is it if no one is there?

Not to be completely negative on Kickstart – if they tied it into Yahoo user accounts and allowed for easy export, there could be some potential. But alone I just can’t picture this working. Is this Yahoo’s spaghetti marketing strategy?

At the bottom of the Kickstart page it says "This is Yahoo!" If this is Yahoo, I am scared for their survival. I am the biggest Yahoo supporter since day 1 but lately the company hasn’t shown any innovation and sadly Kickstart is more non-innovation cloning. C’mon Yang get it together pal!