How LinkedIn Takes the Stress out of Friendships - Alessandro Di Fiore via Harvard Business Review

Di Fiore suppors the premise that LinkedIn helps us make use of weak ties, but suggests that the mediation of LinkedIn can also decrease the friction that can arise when asking a strong tie for a favor:

Alessandro Di Fiore via Harvard Business Review

On-line professional networks are successful around the world. In cultures like the US where people are comfortable transacting with strangers you might expect that. But why are these networks also popular in countries like Spain and Italy where business is kept inside friends and family? It is difficult to imagine that you can enter into those circles by posting a well designed profile on your LinkedIn page.

There are two explanations, I think. First and more obvious, social media can help you create weak links. Someone you make a brief acquaintance with and whom you might easily have lost touch with can be kept in your circle thanks to social media. And the possibility also remains for you to turn that weak link into a strong one. Before LinkedIn and other professional networks came on the scene it was just too costly in terms of time and mental focus to update, communicate, keep alive weak tie relationships. “We will stay in touch …” is easy to say but very hard to do. The impact of on-line professional networks on weak relationships is terrific because they let you exploit this “untapped” reserve of Social Capital.

The second explanation, I think, is that social media — contrary to common belief — allows you to better manage also your strong links. Picking up a phone or visiting someone in person puts you and them on the spot and consumes a lot of Social Capital. If you’re asking a friend for a favor personally it is very hard for that person to feel that they can say no. They may resent you for asking. It can be hard to ask as well; many people don’t ask friends to help because they are too proud. But if you ask your close friend a favor through Facebook or LinkedIn it signals to the person you’re approaching that you do not regard help in this case as a test of the relationship, which instantly reduces the tension for both sides.

By choosing LinkedIn instead of a direct call or a visit, the initiator signals that the request is a small favor, one to be handled in a spare moment and only if it doesn’t cause any great effort. This avoids using too much social capital, Di Fiore argues.

LinkedIn Lets Companies Share Their Own Status Updates - Jon Mitchell

Jon Mitchell via RWW

LinkedIn has launched status updates from companies. Administrators of company pages can post short updates just like individual users can. This provides companies with a way to engage followers and start conversations from within the public LinkedIn stream.

Users of LinkedIn could follow company profiles since 2010. Previously, users following a company would see personnel changes, new job openings and company profile updates. Now companies can also share 500-character messages, links and media with followers as well.

I wonder if this portends a step closer toward real federation of work on LinkedIn? Will LinkedIn move toward  a work media implementation?

femmebot: Social networks do best when they tap into one of the seven deadly sins. Facebook is ego. Zynga is sloth. LinkedIn is greed. (via Venture Capitalist Reid Hoffman - WSJ.com) Doesn’t include Twitter, which is envy? Pride? Lust?
Zoom

femmebot:

Social networks do best when they tap into one of the seven deadly sins. Facebook is ego. Zynga is sloth. LinkedIn is greed.

(via Venture Capitalist Reid Hoffman - WSJ.com)

Doesn’t include Twitter, which is envy? Pride? Lust?

Andrew Lipsman, The Network Effect: Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter & Tumblr Reach New Heights in May Beginning with Linkedin, the popular business networking site’s success should not come as a complete shock following its blistering May 19th IPO. Others can debate the merits of the company’s current valuation, but I will simply point out that there is definite underlying strength in Linkedin’s user adoption curve at the moment. In fact, it has reached all-time U.S. audience highs in 7 of the past 12 months and has grown 58 overall percent in the past year. As Linkedin continues its evolution from being an online business rolodex to a more social and interactive content experience, it will be interesting to see if its rapid visitor growth is accompanied by a surge in user engagement. Twitter.com also had a particularly strong month in May with 27 million U.S. visitors, representing an increase of 13 percent in the past year. (Note: while much of Twitter’s usage occurs away from the Twitter.com site, past comScore research has indicated that approximately 85-90% of Twitter users visit the website each month). Twitter’s success in May can likely be attributed in part to the exceptionally buzzworthy news story of Osama Bin Laden’s death, as well as ongoing discussion of the Royal Wedding. Also not to be overlooked is social blogging site Tumblr, which has made some noise this year and become a serious player in the social networking category. The site has grown an impressive 166% in the past year, reaching 10.7 million visitors in May, its first month ever surpassing the 10 million visitor mark. Tumblr is clearly experiencing a viral adoption curve right now and may be nearing that point at which other social media sites begin have reached that critical mass threshold that propels it to more widespread adoption. It still has a ways to go before we can mention it in the same breath as Linkedin or Twitter, but it just might get there if it maintains its current trajectory. Tumblr has doubled its monthly uniques in a year, while Twitter and LinkedIn are growing more gradually, but still moving fast. Comscore also displayed a graph showing Facebook and Myspace, implying that the defecting Myspace users were moving to Facebook. Considering the wave of musical types flooding into Tumblr, I bet it is more a factor in Tumblr’s growth.
Zoom

Andrew Lipsman, The Network Effect: Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter & Tumblr Reach New Heights in May

Beginning with Linkedin, the popular business networking site’s success should not come as a complete shock following its blistering May 19th IPO. Others can debate the merits of the company’s current valuation, but I will simply point out that there is definite underlying strength in Linkedin’s user adoption curve at the moment. In fact, it has reached all-time U.S. audience highs in 7 of the past 12 months and has grown 58 overall percent in the past year. As Linkedin continues its evolution from being an online business rolodex to a more social and interactive content experience, it will be interesting to see if its rapid visitor growth is accompanied by a surge in user engagement.

Twitter.com also had a particularly strong month in May with 27 million U.S. visitors, representing an increase of 13 percent in the past year. (Note: while much of Twitter’s usage occurs away from the Twitter.com site, past comScore research has indicated that approximately 85-90% of Twitter users visit the website each month). Twitter’s success in May can likely be attributed in part to the exceptionally buzzworthy news story of Osama Bin Laden’s death, as well as ongoing discussion of the Royal Wedding.

Also not to be overlooked is social blogging site Tumblr, which has made some noise this year and become a serious player in the social networking category. The site has grown an impressive 166% in the past year, reaching 10.7 million visitors in May, its first month ever surpassing the 10 million visitor mark. Tumblr is clearly experiencing a viral adoption curve right now and may be nearing that point at which other social media sites begin have reached that critical mass threshold that propels it to more widespread adoption. It still has a ways to go before we can mention it in the same breath as Linkedin or Twitter, but it just might get there if it maintains its current trajectory.

Tumblr has doubled its monthly uniques in a year, while Twitter and LinkedIn are growing more gradually, but still moving fast.

Comscore also displayed a graph showing Facebook and Myspace, implying that the defecting Myspace users were moving to Facebook. Considering the wave of musical types flooding into Tumblr, I bet it is more a factor in Tumblr’s growth.

LINKEDIN: The Truth About What It's Worth

Henry Blodgett via

The bottom line is that LinkedIn is a real company with a huge opportunity, and no one knows what the stock is worth. There are scenarios in which the stock will deliver a nice return from this level. There are also (many) scenarios in which LinkedIn will deliver a lousy return from this level—or, worse, incinerate 75% or more of investors’ capital.

Personally, I would not touch LinkedIn’s stock at this level, because I think the risk is too high. The potential upside, in my opinion, just isn’t compelling enough to offset the potential downside. (Some smart investors disagree with me, though, and are hanging on to the stock. And that’s what makes a market.)

But that’s very different than thinking the valuation is “insane.”

My bet is that social tools — like LinkedIn and Twitter — will turn out to be the best bet over the next few years. Note that operating systems — like iOS — are becoming social tools. Facebook is a special case, because it has grown so far, and is threatened by the emergence of social operating systems: an AOL crash in the making.

[disclosure: I am an active investor in Apple, and I have shares in LinkedIn, as well.]

[…] with yesterday’s news that LinkedIn is becoming a traffic firehose with its new focus on content, we should note the big reason why LinkedIn would make a very valuable social property for Google.

LinkedIn has one thing that no one else except Facebook has: REAL IDENTITIES.

[…]

With LinkedIn, Google would instantly get a database of 100 million real and valuable identities, which it can then cross-pollinate with Google Profiles, its own ho-hum effort to get people to give it their own real identities.

— Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry,  Why Google Should Buy LinkedIn Now, Before It’s Too Late

I completely buy this argument. Go read the whole piece.

[disclosure: I am a shareholder of LinkedIn and have a financial interest in the company’s future performance.]

Just as Google had early dominance in lighting up a portion of the web, Facebook has early dominance in lighting up a portion of the world’s social graph. But much like the Dark Web, there exists network upon network not yet graphed by Facebook, waiting to be mapped, organized, and optimized for communication.

This is the unlit social graph, and this is where Facebook is vulnerable.

Let’s talk examples.

For years I have been looking for a solution to the pick-up basketball problem. I have a large-ish network of people that I play hoops with in San Francisco. This network has not yet been lit up by any online service. While most of these people are on Facebook, they are hard to organize as I don’t know many of their last names. And furthermore, even if I did know their last names, I would feel awkward friending them on Facebook, as they’re not really my friends.

It’s a network, but it’s not a friend network, not a professional network, and not a work network. This particular network is a place based network, aligned around various basketball courts in San Francisco.

Over the years, we’ve tried to light up our hoops network, but haven’t been able to find the right tools. We tried Google Groups, but it got overrun by spammers. A Facebook Group set up for this purpose never really got traction.

We tried GroupMe, but the push aspect wasn’t appropriate, it needed to be pull – find ballers when you’re ready to play, not when others are ready to play.

Just last week, I read about a company called Sportaneous that is trying to solve this problem.

Ubiquitous smartphones and always on access to umbrella social graphs are suddenly making these sort of tools possible.

And the opportunity is far larger than pick-up basketball, or even sports. Every school is a network, every employer is a network, every bar is a network, every office building is a network, every hobby is a network, every neighborhood is a network, and at an extreme level, every shared interest is a network, regardless of location.

This doesn’t even get at the disposable, or elastic networks as discussed by companies like Nearverse and Color – people that happen to just be nearby each other for a snapshot of time.

All of these networks share two common characteristics. 1) They are not yet graphed in a mainstream way by Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Jive, or any other dominant, online social service; and 2) They are all mappable with a smartphone.

- Lawrence Coburn, The Unlit Social Graph - TNW Location

I am not so sure that the unlit corners of our social networks are all mappable with a smartphone, in some exclusive sense. But I do agree that large parts of the multidimensional social network are unmapped.

PS Can we all agree to stop using the term ‘social graph’? It’s a Zuckebergism, and has no meaning other than what mathematicians, social anthropologists, and other scientists have been talking about for decades as social networks.

So then we would refer to this issue as dark networks.

LinkedIn and Plaxo: Adapt or Die

Dan Farber’s scoop about LinkedIn’s plans to adapt to the new world that Facebook is making is almost anticlimatic:

[from � LinkedIn to open up to developers | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com by Dan Farber]

I talked to LinkedIn founder and Chairman Reid Hoffman on Friday at the Supernova 2007 conference about Facebook’s rapid growth and potential incursion into his territory. He told me that over next 9 months LinkedIn would deliver APIs for developers, ostensibly to make it more of platform like Facebook, and create a way for users who spend more time socially in Facebook to get LlinkedIn notifications.

One half of that message is just sensible: if you have a huge social network, why not allow others to build on top of it? The second half almost suggests conceding leadership to Facebook, as if Facebook is the really social social network, while Linkedin is some more functional thing that just so happens to work based on social relationships. Which is really what I have always thought was wrong with LinkedIn: it’s a bunch of business processes that are partially automated that rely on a large database of people’s relationships. It is, however, not the sort of place where you make or foster relationships. So, in a way, Reid is conceding nothing, since what Facebook is doing is intensely social, not just leveraging a big dataset of contacts.

In a similar fashion, Plaxo’s Ben Golub and I spoke the other day, and the ‘contact unmanagement’ company has released a beta of Plaxo 3.0: a real category shift, in many ways. Along with a long roster of synchronization options (like Google Calendar, Mac OS X Address Book and Calendar, Outlook, and especially, LinkedIn, which represents a whole new angle: syncing social networks (to be expanded in another post)), Golub and company have added a ‘Pulse’ feature that plants the product over in the camp of flow apps, like Twitter, Jaiku, and Facebook.

Plaxo Pulse

Pulse pulls new media traffic from your Plaxo contacts: photos from Flickr, blog updates, address modifications, and so on. I have already requested some kind of desktop tool (like Twitterific) for Pulse.

I find the Plaxo sync stuff sort of awkward, but that’s because I have my calendars and contacts spread out in a very unique way. I use Google Calendar as my actual calendar, and only sync to the Mac OS X iCal so I can sync to my phone. And I have addresses all over, primarily because I can’t sync between my Mac Address app and Google. If Plaxo fixes that I would be happy, but the Google address sync is still planned for the future.

I see Plaxo breaking into two twinned parts: synchronization of various sorts of coordinative data caught up in calendars, address books and to-do lists (yawn… useful, but so twentieth century), and a new (less boring) collection of services that are traffic-and-flow based.

Pulse is another run at the Nerdvana meme I have been pursuing for a long, long time. The basic notion of Nerdvana is that we want to have updates of all sorts from our contacts collated into a buddylist representation, which is where Golub tells be Plaxo is headed. I could see Brian Solis’ online presence, most recent status message, last five blog posts, and recent Flickr pictures, but linked to the buddylist icon for Brian.

[I can’t tell you how many IM companies I have have suggested this too, over the years, by the way. But again, we have to look to the upstarts to do the breakthroughs, I guess.]

If Plaxo heads this way, my recommendation will be to break Pulse out as a separate application, one that relies on data managed within the Plaxo platform, but sylistically and operationally separate. It has nothing to do with sync of data, and everything to do with media traffic flowing through personal relationships.

Both Plaxo and LinkedIn seem to be making serious business model adjustments, based on the new world.

Unlinking From Social Networks: Part 2

My project to unlink myself from the dozens or more social networking apps I have registered with is gaining momentum, and a lot of heat. The back channel — where dozens of people have emailed me asking me what the hell I’m up to — has been four or five times as active as the public interchange here at Get Real and over at Operating Manual for Social Tools (a project now closing down).

Questions range from “why are you dropping out of social networks in general and LinkedIn in specific” to statements of support and agreement with my general comments. Here, in a nutshell, are my motivations:

  • I have participated in the various public social networks only passively — responding to others requests to connect, and occasionally passing along a request to connect to some contact.
  • Because of the investments I have made in existing modes of networking — particularly social media based networks — I have not spent any significant time trying to exploit the SNAs.
  • I have had a couple of disquieting interactions with those trying to aggressively promote themselves, their products or services through SNAs, as recounted here and here. I don’t really want to be prey to that sort of predator.
  • I have wound up getting dozens of requests each month in the various networks by people more than two degrees away trying to reach people more than two degrees away, where I have little social capital involved, and I uniformally have been turning down those requests. In essence, these are a form of spam, although one that is allowed by the ‘rules of engagement’ surrounding the SNAs.
  • I am annoyed that the SNAs don’t provide opt out at every juncture: please don’t involve me in requests like this, please don’t allow this person to contact me. please don’t contact me ever. The services vary widely in this regard. I was able to drop out of LinkedIn within a 24 hour period, although it does require sending a message to customer support.
  • And I have an abiding interest in the creation of an interoperable basis for social networks. My experience in the instant messagingworld — where we have several large public networks that do not interact easily — demonstrates the problems inherent in pushing ahead with a fragmented model, where several large players will grow without any obvious incentives for interoperability, although it may well be in the public interest. (See the recent story about SocialPhysics.org, as an alternative.)

I set up a poll at www.votations.com that has just about a 100 respondents. Although my poll is flawed (for example, the first two questions are really the same, stated slightly differently), I am still interested in the results.

  • Of the respondents (which are primarily my contacts at LinkedIn), roughly one third are passive users, not initiating activities but just responding to requests from others.
  • One third have considered dropping out, because of lack of acitivity or too many requests.
  • 75%+ of respondents believe they have been socially spammed (“someone trying to use the SNA in a way that does not line up with my goals or profile”).
  • Roughly one third state that SNAs “are lacking critical features” — a lot of missing features — that would make them usable.

There is a sizable group, perhaps even more than half who find SNAs beneficial.
The remainder have serious issues and questions. My read is that these technologies are immature, have a long way to go, and probably have not assumed the form that will in the long run be the ‘killer app’ for SNAs.

My bet is that a deep integration of an open platform for social networking that easily integrates with social media is the best bet for future success. I would appreciate any other pointers to SNA research or development in this area: that’s where I think the missing critical features lie.

I plan to rework the poll, and press on with my retreat from SNAs. Next are ZeroDegrees, Spoke, Orkut, Friendster, Tribe.net, and so on. More to follow.