Tuesday, November 11

What? No Bullsh*t Bingo Social Game?

So LinkedIn finally joined the Internet circa 2006 by providing embedded widget apps to its users. They have to be pre-approved by the site, similar to getting an app in the iPhone store. There are currently only 9 apps available. Which means either the approval criteria is really tough, LinkedIn is really lazy, or companies aren't rushing to take advantage of it.

LinkedIn has always been the sober, dress shirt & tie kind of site. Which is fine, considering it really is focused on business networking and loosely-veiled job searching (befriend a couple local recruiters and watch their new friend notices). But of the 9 apps, 3 are blog readers, 4 are workspace/document sharing, and 1 is the requisite Amazon fave book lister.

The blog readers are slightly useful, since they automatically found blogs by my network that I don't have time to track down. But an even more useful tool would be one that provides a visual perspective of my network connections. LinkedIn is very 1.0 when it comes to presenting user connections/degrees of seperation. How about a Visual Thesaurus-style map, allowing me to see who is 1, 2, or 3 connections away from each other and explore via click-n-drag. Cross-reference it with specific companies/industries of interest and you could get really fancy.

2 comments:

Asian Driver said...

Shut up about widgets already.

--stephen said...

Just my online marketing headfake. Widgets are soooooo August 2008.