mamamusings: May 7, 2003

linkedin: first impressions

You know something is happening when you get five separate requests from people you know—in a two-hour period, no less—to join a new networking service. So last night I gave in to peer pressure, and accepted the invitations to join LinkedIn, a new business-focused networking service developed by Reid Hoffman (formerly of Paypal).

I posted my first impressions over at Joi Ito’s blog, but I thought I’d expand upon them a bit here.

The site has a nice look to it, and the interface is reasonably straightforward. But…it doesn’t do much for me. I’m not really a “businessperson,” I suppose, and maybe I’m missing the mark here. But I dislike being asked to draw these boundaries between my “social” interactions and my “business” interactions. My relationships are more fluid than that. How do I classify my relationship to people like Joi Ito and Marc Canter and Shelley Powers? Business associates? No. We’ve never “conducted business.” Friends? Well, sort of. As much as you can be without ever having met someone in person. Colleagues? In a virtual, distributed way, maybe. Part of my social network? Absolutely! Valuable contacts for me in professional and personal contexts? For sure.

Friendster wants to be for dating and socializing. Group-formers and business people need not apply. (And their refusal to remove the often obscene BBS posting titles from the main page is a strong indication that they want to keep it that way.) LinkedIn wants to be for serious business networkers only. None of that fraternization stuff here. Neither one gives me the environment that I really want—a way to visualize my connections to the people I have relationships to, and build on those relationships to find connections to others.

Specifically, here’s what I don’t like about LinkedIn.

• I can’t see people’s pictures. No, this isn’t a deal-breaker. But dammit, Adam’s right. It’s Friendster’s killer app, and it’s the one thing in that system that makes me go back to it again and again. At least one person has told me that this is to “discourage dating,” which I find to be an unconvincing argument. We put photos of speakers on conference pages, and I doubt they get trolls for dates as a result. Context is everything.

• I can’t browse the network. Specifically, I can’t see my contacts’ contacts. Why would I want to do that? No, not because I’m looking for a date. I’m happily married, thankyouverymuch. Because I want to understand the nature of the social networks I’m involved in. If I’m going to share my connection info with the system, I want it to give me something back. Let me see out to at least one degree of separation.

• The searching is seriously hampered by the fact that users can only declare themselves as part of one primary industry area. To accurately describe myself, I need to indicate higher ed and technology. And there are several areas of technology that are appropriate. Plus I’d like to throw my library science background in there. No can do. People have to pick one to search on, and I have to pick one to label myself with. That means lots and lots of people won’t find each other.

• Once I’ve located a person I’m interested in contacting, and initiate the connection, it starts out fine. I tested this out with two people I know—one who was already a contact (Ross Mayfield), and one who was in the system but not yet explictly my contact (Pete Kaminski). I specify what kind of contact I want with Pete. It tells me the contact has to go through Ross (until that point, I don’t know how Pete and I are connected.) Ross gets email telling him I want to make this contact to Pete. If he approves it, the request goes to Pete. Pete’s interested, so he says “ok.” Now, here’s the fatal flaw. After Pete says yes—not before—the site tells me I have upgrade to get Pete’s contact information. WTF??? This guy is sitting and waiting for me to complete the contact I’ve initiated. If I don’t do it, I look like an idiot now. But to do it, I have to give money to LinkedIn. Bad, bad model. Left a very unpleasant taste in my mouth. Want to make money of the site? Fine. But don’t make the most basic use of the system contingent on that money. Prove its worth to me first. Then give me a reason to want to upgrade.

Yes, I’m a curmudgeon. But I really am frustrated by this artificial categorization of my social network, and the barriers imposed by centralized systems that ask me to characterize for them the nature of my relationships, and then give me relatively little flexibility in how that information in used.

Adam Greenfield thinks there’s still room for a hybrid that brings together the best of Friendster and LinkedIn (and Ryze, and…?). I’m increasingly unconvinced. The centralization is the problem. The system designers seem unable to keep themselves from imposing their view of how relationships are defined onto the users of the system. A decentralized approach would help reduce that problem. It would also address the problem of having to re-enter your personal data in every single new system, which is driving me nuts.

So I guess I’m slowly but surely being lured into the DigID discussions, which obviously impact on this whole issue of defining myself, and defining my connections. Once I get through the end of this quarter (two weeks and counting ‘til the last exam is given!), I’ll have to start digging a little deeper in that area.

i knew it, i knew it, i knew it!

From a trusted correspondent, talking with a contact who works at the Netscape part of AOL/Time Warner. “He said they had decided that weblogs are the next killer app, and that most of the work at the Mountain View office was going into building a weblog component for AOL. He also mentioned that about 400 people are working on that software. This is in constrast to about 20 who are working on Mozilla.”

So I’m talking with one of my colleagues about blogs, and explaining how only twice in my life have I had this sense that a technology was about to become really important. We’re both reminiscing about the early days of post-BITNET e-mail, and the first wave of web sites (remember O’Reilly’s Network Navigator?). And then the conversation turns to “what happened to all that promise”? I remind him of the day the AOL floodgates opened and usenet and e-mail were never the same. What’s going to be the effect on blogging when/if the exponential curve takes its sharp turn upwards?

Could Winer’s trust be misplaced? After news of AOL’s plans broke on the site Good Experience, AOL confirmed it did have some kind of blogging application up its sleeve. AOL told Random Access that it would say more about it in June or July, but not before then. But those familiar with AOL’s plans called the head count reported on Winer’s blog implausible at best. “La-la land” is where one AOL insider placed the 400 number, pointing out that AOL has long had tools that let people post content of their own and making the leap from those tools to blogging software would not require anywhere near that amount of staff.

where the boys are...

…isn’t where I want to be these days.

Shelley convinced me to join the blogunlimited list, after the blogrollers list went south with divisive and defensive interactions. So I did. And I’ve been reading it for a little while, but not participating.

Here’s how the story goes, so far as I can see:

a) Shelley posts an interesting query about the semantic web
b) A discussion begins, with posts from a number of people with interesting ideas
c) Shelley responds with questions and ideas, at the same time that predictable people begin posting predictable rants about predictable topics (RSS, for example. OPML. what constitutes an ad hominem attack. yada, yada, yada.)
d) Shelley’s points are essentially ignored in favor of the same-old-same-old peacocking and posturing among the boys.
e) Shelley gets mad.
f) Shelley gets noticed only because she got mad.
g) People like me unsubscribe because the signal-to-noise ratio is getting worse by the second, and they’d rather read blogs than wade through cross-posts and arguments.

Am I being sexist? I’m sure I’ll be accused of it. But it gets easier all the time for me to understand why there are so few women on the technical lists, at the technical conferences, doing the technical work. Who needs all this bickering? Personally, I get enough of that from my kids. And my co-workers.

Maybe it’s the perceived impermanence of the e-mail (as opposed to the blog entries) that encourages the pettiness, and that allows interesting ideas to get lost in the swell of mutiply-quoted messages. Or maybe it’s the fact that because reading blogs is a pull rather than push technology, it’s easier for me to detach when the discussions head in a non-productive (for me) direction. Regardless of the reason, I’m finding myself increasingly disenchanted with mailing lists, and correspondingly appreciative of blogs.

Now I’m going to go re-read Jeneane’s post about Halley’s blog. Chicken soup for the blogger’s soul, don’t you think?

Update
For the first time since I created this blog, I’m closing the comments on an entry. I’m simply not interested in a debate about this post. It was me venting, on my blog. Don’t agree with me? Your prerogative. Post about your difference of opinion on your own blog.

on comments

One of the things I love about Movable Type is its comments management. Unlike Blogger, MT incorporates comments into the blog engine itself. It’s fast, efficient, customizable. And comments allow blogs to blur the boundaries between publishing and dialogues.

I’ve had comments on my blog since it started, and value the way they allow anyone reading to join in the conversations. My first ventures into the blogosphere were through comments on other people’s blogs—which were warmly received, and made me feel like I had a voice that could be heard. (Thanks, Joi. :-)

So my decision today to turn off comments on a post was not made lightly. I posted in haste, and have time to repent at leisure. I shifted between deleting the post entirely, and simply turning off the comments…and decided on the latter.

Why? I just don’t have the energy to debate the gender issue right now. The first few comments were so *(^$ familiar. And I know it’s not malice that spurs them. But at the moment I just don’t want to go there.

So what’s the difference between a mailing list and a blog? Why is my turning off comments different from Dave Winer announcing he won’t approve mailing list posts?

That’s easy for me to answer. This blog is not a public space, it’s a private one. It has never been presented as anything else. In many ways, it feels like my online home. I welcome visitors, and enjoy discussions with them. I’ve had plenty of people disagree with me in comments, and that’s fine, too. But there are times when I just don’t want to have another discussion on the same divisive topic in my living room. I don’t want to stop others from having that discussion—I just don’t want them to have it here.

Trackbacks are still enabled, so people with trackback-enabled blogs can write about any of my posts to their hearts’ content, and—through the magic of trackback technology—a pointer will appear back to their sites.

And because I’m drunk with the power of it all, I’m not even turning comments on for this post. :)

the laugh i needed tonight

Via Grumpygirl, this incomparable site-eating tool.

You feed it a URL, and it…well, it’s hard to explain what it does. Here’s its version of my blog. Wow.