Linked In
Published on 10 Jun 2007 at 10:05 am.
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Filed under Entrepreneurship, Internet.
LinkedIn is an internet-based business networking service. It boasts about 11 million users from over 100 industries. It is similar to MySpace, but for professionals. You won’t see funny movies of ferrets eating pepper or people making musical farting sounds with their hands— and that is the advantage. In LinkedIn you make a profile, which contains information about your education, career, interests, honors, etc. The profiles are much more constrained than MySpace, which makes searching for individuals meeting certain criteria practical.
Instead of “friends” a la MySpace, you enter connections to people who you know professionally (who are very often also your friends). You are not just supposed to connect to everyone you can. The idea is to connect only to those people you really know. In LinkedIn, neither Danny Elfman nor Madonna will be connections of mine anytime soon.
Let’s say you want to find someone who does work in robotics. You search for People with the keyword of your choice, in this case: Robotics. LinkedIn replies with a list of people with robotics experience who are connected to you. The first-order connections are the people you actually know. The second-order connections are people you do not know, but are people who someone you know knows. The search goes up to third-order. There is no need to go any higher as the network grows exponentially. By sixth-order, you should have connected to just about everyone—this is the six degrees of separation idea. However, if you had access to all of LinkedIn’s data, you could actually calculate the average degree of separation. That would be an interesting project.
My personal robotics search came up with a list of 500 people. I can refine the search by entering more keywords, such as MBARI, or I can request an introduction to a person of interest. This is then mediated by the system sending an email to the person of interest. Our relationship is described to them, and they have the option to reply to me or to ignore the introduction. This can dramatically facilitate professional interactions.
I have been using LinkedIn for about 3 years and I am surprised to see that I now have 60 connections in my Profile. My second-order network consists of more than 2700 people, and my third-order network consists of more than 272,600 people!
Kevin Knuth
Albany NY
