LinkedIn, a social networking website primarily focused on business connections has added a section to their site that allows users to recommend service providers — a yellow pages based on user referrals. From web designers to doctors, users rate service providers in a thumbs up, thumbs down voting system similar to Digg.
LinkedIn has continued to gain members, increasing membership to 7.7 million as of September. Their specific focus has allowed them to compete with MySpace and Facebook’s younger audiences, as well as start-up CollectiveX and the ailing Friendster.
Idealab-founded InsiderPages.com has been amassing their own yellow pages that relies on the user community to provide rants and recommendations on businesses — ditto with start-up Judy’s Book. Yelp, which just raised another $10 million this month, is doing similar with restaurants and shopping, but their next logical step would be service providers. IAC-owned Citysearch is the “old dog” in this category, focusing on restaurant and shopping recommendations, but also has many service provider categories that just aren’t featured very well.
There are 23 million businesses in the U.S. and by 2010, local businesses are estimated to spend $10 billion in online advertising. Yellow page print books might seem archaic and wasteful to the tech-savvy, but they are still widely used and the industry is valued at more than $26 billion worldwide ($14 billion in the U.S.).
All these ideas are great , but who is free to sign up and do the recommendations?
Recommendations come from clients of the service providers, and only recommended service providers are included in the directory.
One of the most important aspects is that recommendations are not anonymous–each one is attached to the profile of the LinkedIn member, and you can narrow down your list of recommendation, such that you only see those made by people you know personally.
If you don’t find a service provider recommended by one of your own connections, you can broaden your search to include recommendations made by the people your contacts know. These are people you can easily reach through a common connection if you want to get more details about their experience with the service provider they recommended.
I think they need to update the way they allow you to network/communicate. For me, the whole point of being on a social network is to network and their tools kind of suck. It feels complicated to communicate – I still don’t exactly get it. On something like that, I just end up giving up and moving onto something else.
I agree w/Patricia- they need to work on the tools a bit. But, I assume they make it hard to do things in the “free” version because they want you to sign up for a monthly subscription – which are priced way too high, IMO.
This idea seems great, but it’s lame that these social networks seem to be pursuing a walled-garden strategy wherein each network is walled-off from the others.
Is there any project out there to create a protocol for interconnecting social networks?
As a user, it would be great to let sites “see” my social network. A simple example would be to find comments on Techcrunch posted by my Linked-In contacts or InsiderPages.com connections.
One of my favorite blogs, CodingHorror just posted on this two days ago. He’s not impressed: http://www.codi...ves/000703.html
Especially with thier ‘opt out’ policy.
I don’t see how anyone could have an issue with another resource to help get stuff done.
The services/connection aspect makes a ton of sense for a social network. We run a site for entrepreneurs that connects them to other service providers and it’s been quite popular with service providers as a new business tool and entrepreneurs as a “yellow pages” tool.
LinkedIn has done a nice job of building their service. I’m sure it will be helpful to a lot of people. Good job, Konstantin!
I am curious about the actual number of LinkedIn users. The number keeps going up: 7.7 million now have accounts. However, when I search on LinkedIn I come across vast numbers of people who have zero or one contact and no apparent activity, suggesting that these people signed in just once because they were sent an invitation or were just curious, and probably have never used the service again.
So how many of the 7.7 million accounts are actually dormant? And what does that say about the value of LinkedIn’s premium pay service that allows you full access to all contacts?
On a closely related service, an estimated 68 million U.S. Internet users performed an Internet Yellow Pages search online in July, according to comScore, an increase of 46% increase versus year ago. Yahoo! Sites lead the IYP searches with 23.9% market share.
Patricia, I agree with what you are saying. That is why I am very excited about what the guys at HiddenMarket.com are doing here in Atlanta. I am currently a user on their private beta, and it is light years ahead of where linkedin and some of the others are (in terms of helping you network).
- LH
For LinkedIn to be successful, there are two key conditions:
(1) do people find the people they are looking for and
(2) are people responsive when they are contacted by an introduction or InMail
We monitor both variables carefully, and it seems to be working well. We reached profitability in March. In fact, all of our development in the past 12 months has been to improve the free version–adoption of premium services continues to do well without requiring us to improve paid services, such as contacting people outside of your network, reference checks, job listings, etc.
Konstantain,
Feedback on two key conditions: No & No.
Regards,
Service recommendations are like assholes…everyone’s got one.
Linked In’s limited value is going down the crapper !
I am happy to see them grow. I’ve had mostly a positive experience with them:
http://manuelhp...od-and-bad.html