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Networking 2.0 — Open Letter to LinkedIn (and their competitors)

The simple truth is that I am a raving fan of LinkedIn–I love it.

However…

About 2/3 of the time when I invite someone to connect with me on LinkedIn, they say something like, “Sure. But does anybody really use it?”

Someone else said, “Isn’t that just like a geek dating service for jobs?” Ooh. That one hurt.

But the reality is that people, especially the new college students/grads, are wanting–no, demanding–software that exists for their wants and needs. Martha Irvine from AP said it best, I think:

Generation Raised With Internet Grows Up
CHICAGO, AP, 12/5/2004 — Young people are now the savviest of the tech-savvy, as likely to demand a speedy broadband connection as to download music onto an iPod, or upload digital photos to their Web logs. The Internet has shaped the way they work, relax and even date. [via]

So, I have a network of a bazillion people in LinkedIn right now (some of them I am very close to and I love the tool for it) but many of them just aren’t seeing the value in it that they originally must have expected. So, at my request, they went through all the hassle of registering and creating a password and divulging all their hidden secrets about their life and now we’re “LinkedIn”… but what does that really mean? What does it do for me that nobody else can do, or I can’t do myself?

LinkedIn, how do I know you really, truly care about me? After all, I am not just a faceless number you can count on to promote that you have 4.4 million people in your database. This should be a give-and-take relationship. Right now, it just feels like I am doing all the giving. All my contacts, personal information and gory details about where I’ve worked, what I’ve done and what interests me.

Since it is the time of the year for giving, let me give you some advice on how you can balance out this relationship (you’re welcome).

Some of these ideas are practically free. Others may cost you a few CPU cycles and a few cases of Dr. Pepper. None of them involve Holiday Greeting Cards (thanks, but no-thanks).

Easy Stuff

• Make it easy for me to display a link to my profile.
  This one should be a no-brainer. I put all my stuff on LinkedIn–let me show it off. Especially all the smart people I know. More than that, I will be 10x more likely to keep my online profile updated if I know people are looking at it. Many people are putting their resumes and bios online. Let me just forward people to LinkedIn, instead.
  BTW, I did find a link to my profile after many days and nights of searching. But, if I didn’t know how to hack URIs and encode HTTP GET request strings, I never would have figured it out.
• Let me make my profile public–if I want (or, at least to Google)
  I am already on Google. I’d really like my LinkedIn profile to be searchable as well. Now, you must be a LinkedIn member to view profiles. Let me give mine to the world, if I want. People who want to connect with me will join.

Feed Me: Unlock your strangle-hold on my information. Let me have some, too.

• Allow me to create a list of people I know on my blog/site
  This is like a blogroll, but don’t miss a few important points:
  • The links should give the option of going to the user’s blog or seeing their LinkedIn profile.
  • XFN rel= tags need to be available to me as I define who my contacts are, and how I know them. Then, I want these output in my contact-feed. If you want, read what Shirley Kaiser says about XFN, and this web-presentation about why XFM allows “rediculously easy group forming” (Given at SXSW, 2004 by Tantek elik)
  • While JavaScript will make implementing this easy, it’s not readable by spiders which makes the data useless. Let me get this data via OPML or RSS as well or, heck, remote PHP works, too.
  • If I give you my Blogrolling.com password, will you update my blogroll with the blogs of new contacts I add?
• RSS feeds/emails of things happening in my network
  When stuff happens to the people in my network, I’d like to know. Allow me to subscribe to a few feeds (contract with Feedblitz to enable feed-to-email service) to know about different things, such as:
  • People that just changed positions/jobs, or added items to their profile
  • New opportunities available
  • New jobs in my personal network
  • Questions being asked by people in my network
  • Events, Trainings, other calendar items from people in my network
  • New blog postings from my trusted contacts
  • New Flickr photos and del.icio.us bookmarks from my trusted contacts

The Holy Grail
If you’re still reading, that’s great. Get to the level I am talking about below, and you’ve got a network everybody on earth will want to be a part of:

Allow me (or third-party companies) to access/change my LinkedIn data via API calls (SOAP/REST, whatever) and ask basic questions to determine intelligent actions based on who I know and how closely I know them. For example:

• I would love it if my email client collected a (secure) list from you of my trusted connections and their email addresses and used that in it’s spam filtering algorithms. This could prevent both false-positives and unreliable filtering based on content alone. (Partner with gmail/yahoo, etc on this one! Also, SpamAssassin and others should jump at the chance to have a user-defined “whitelist” that requires no programming by the user!)
• Overlay LinkedIn data from Google Maps/Yahoo Maps, etc, to show me where my contacts live.
• Let my contacts update LinkedIn with coordinates of where they are right now, enabling offline connections. Many cell-phones are enabling GPS location notification–work with Verizon/Cingular, etc, and allow my cell-phone to tell you where I am on earth right now (if I want)
• If I give you my Instant Messenger username and password, will you add my new contacts to my buddy list?
• If someone in my trusted contacts list calls my cell-phone, can you tell me who it is?
• Can you enable my cellphone/pda to alert me when people I know are close to me –or– give me the ability to browse a list of people I may be in a room with via some notification. For example, everyone who enters a conference room is registered and that list is compared with my LinkedIn database to tell me who of those people I know, and how I know them–or who I should meet.

In summary, here’s my pitch and request: LinkedIn, I love your tool. It’s easy, fresh, kinda fun and it’s an incredibly easy way to actively manage my contacts and relationships. The next step is for LinkedIn to actively help me passively manage my relationships. Help me keep up on things that I may not have known are happening.

The other key here is to strike up relationships that don’t constantly drive subscription fees. Some of these features I think are prime for fees in the right place, and to the right organization. But, please don’t be so concerned about driving revenue that you miss the fact that the value you add to your data will define the revenue you’ll make in the long-run.

• Visits to your website will go way up when more people are actively using, grooming and managing their contacts via your portal.
• Subscription deals can be struck with content providers and others to drive incremental revenue streams from data you’re already providing.
  That will enrich their user’s-experience, binding their customers closer to their service, and all of it stems from you opening access to your system.

If you do that for me, LinkedIn will be as valuable to busy professionals as a resume is to job-seekers or a phone-number is to communication.

If you don’t do this, I fear for you that the list of queries matching “better than LinkedIn” will grow very large, very soon.

Good luck, and thanks for the service!

Tags: linkedin networking contacts manage relationships XFN GPS instant messenger location notification RSS email communication

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Tags: Cool Tools & Apps, Rants, Recruiting, Social-Networking, Web/Tech