OSS Watch team blog

On a number of occasions I have blogged and presented my concerns about current social networking sites. Some of my main concerns revolve around the fact that my email client is my main online communication tool and I don’t want to work with a suboptimal communication channel (although I’m happy to augment eMail where appropriate). Furthermore, I don’t want to maintain my network manually, in multiple places and in an externally owned data store. The vast majority of this information can be derived from my mail communications logs, networking sites shouldn’t need me to manually recode this data.

Despite these concerns, I do believe there is some value in the emerging social networking environment. I’ve been returning to take a look periodically, since creating my first account on Orkut in 2002. Until recently I’d not seen anything to blow me away.

LinkedIn is a site aimed at professional networking. It’s been around for quite a while, and has grown steadily in terms of users, but not in terms of silly gadgets. Of all the social networking tools I find it the most promising, although still deeply flawed.

It is minimalist and relies on human to human communications to build the real network. People who believe a valuable network is one in which “friends” are people who “watch” you do things, as opposed to actively participate with you, or people who have the time to waste on frivolous toys like “poke” will not like LinkedIn. However, people who feel that a valuable network is one with expertise that can be drawn upon when appropriate will find it useful.

Despite the narrow focus of LinkedIn I was still frustrated with the need to manually maintain my network. I simply don’t have the time to search out everyone I make contact with and add them to my network. However, earlier this week I spotted the LinkedIn EMail toolbar. Unfortunately it is only available for MS Outlook, but I decided to set one o f my accounts up in Outlook and give it a go.

I was underwhelmed by Outlook (in around 7 days of use it has crashed twice), but blown away by the features of the LinkedIn toolbar…

When I get an email from someone I can instantly see if they have a linked in account, complete with a summary of how they are connected to me. This happens right where I do my communications, in my email client. If the author doesn’t have an account I can invite them to my network with a simple click.

The toolbar also scans my mail periodically and, via a dashboard page in my email client, tells me of any new contacts that I can add to my network (and local address book of course). There are other useful features, such as having it nag me to communicate with a contact within a given amount of time, the nagging stops once an email is sent.

This is what I call networking. People interacting with people as individuals rather than the faceless masses. I deliberately avoid the word “social” here, LinkedIn is more about business networking than social networking. Now, if only a social networking site would learn from this approach.

Perhaps the Mozilla Foundation, who recently announced they are to put effort into innovation in the email client will help leverage eMail in a web2.0 world.