I’d rather the blog post was written 30 days after a product was released, with a real review, than 30 days before with un-filtered PR hype. There already is a site for this content, it is PRNewswire!

Speaking of launch: Visible Path has launched in 2004, and 2006, and now again in 2007? The releases are on their own site. Doesn’t California have a 3 strikes rule?

instead of sounding like you’re on the brink of throwing knives, why not do it right? why not find an underserved niche and pull your “i’m gonna linkedin this market myself” – here are a few for you:

religious leaders/house of worship: over 435 thousand churches, synagogues and mosques in the usa, all with 2-10+ leadership figures and millions of volunteers in managerial type roles (camps, events, etc) – and on, beliefnet is not effectively serving this need, they are spread quite thin trying to cater to all communicants, which is wrong because it’s so constrained…

hs.college transition: guidance counselors, college placement personnel, etc…

I find it interesting that people (smart/ communicators/ good friends) still don’t get it. Most of the friends I know who don’t get it are the ones who are more afraid of spam (vc/bloggers); that’s a shame because they are essentially missing out on something very valuable and under-utilized. This is about an entirely different approach towards networking — it is about having valuable information when you need it. Here’s another catch: You don’t always know where that essential piece of information will find its way into your network. Sooner or later you will need it, and if you don’t have a network, it will take you a while to build one.

As I write this, I realize, there’s more: LinkedIn has unveiled a deeper reality and sense of connection with the entire industry – because at the end of the day, its all people and relationships. I’m pretty darn grateful.

-Steven Burda

too bad!

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So, although I’ll probably continue to maintain an account w/ Linkedin, I applaud any and all competitive pressure brought to bear on them in the hopes that either something better will come along or Linkedin will be forced to evolve.

LinkedIn needs to push beyond Recruiting/Careers:
*Silo’d: it remains a silo, needs to be interegrated with other web-apps e.g. Intuit communities.
*Answers: good quality, but very limited depth in key categories. start engaging users in the services by syndicating this to relevant web apps e.g. Intuit, work.com, etc.
*Services: poor product execution of what can be the eBay or Alibaba of business services. nobody has tapped this market and they are best positioned to do so given they have built in reputation system.
*Business publishing platform: slightly out there but the idea is to integrate with feed readers, social bookmarking, etc. so you could see what people in your network are reading/saying. There are very few people who can provide this level of personalization and LinkedIn should cease this oppty.

A few complaints for the folks at LinkedIn:
*I get the fact that you need to generate some revenues and I am fine with that, but please don’t show me a big display ad for some random movie trailer. With all the info. you have on me (where I live, what I do, where I went to school) you can and need to do far better then that.
*Feature bloat: the homepage is becoming a mess (very yahoo.com’ish). no human can process this much information. There are some tough decisions to make on that page, but it needs to be radically re-designed.

Hope somebody over at LinkedIn is listening before I need to retract my previous statement that this is game over.

I think Visible Path is an awesome idea. Take LinkedIn and add some science to create automatic weight in relationships. Use that weight to detremine which introductions might succeed or fail. The theory is real. It translates into $. You can argue that the system can be abused – take Google – we still use the search engine and the world is trying to abuse it with polluting keywords.

At my time at Visible Path we could scan Lotus Notes and Outlook and had early prototypes for web mail and such. So it’s a matter of time till these get developed. These are just collectors of statistical data, nobody is reading your e-mail. SFDC integration could be awesome too. PBX?

Bottom line, don’t dismiss the idea that quickly. Social Networking is in the stages of word processing ten years ago. We’re just scratching the surface.

I love Linked In and find a ton of value in it. They are 10 steps ahead, have probably already tried things that VP hasn’t even thought of, and could replicate new features on an installed base of 10 million+.

I think it wil be released witin a couple of months.
My guess is that the guys at Redmond can profide better integration and had a bigger budget (the software was developed as MS Reseach).

This kind of thing demos beautifuuly. I know. I demoed the orginal.
At the risk of going down a path that dredges up all sorts of unwanted baggage….

I was a Spoke co-founder, and drove the integration of an email plug-in to help seed the social network there (in 2002). If email is working for you, you can build other plugions, so any whining about outlook is just silly (Fred). I”m sure VP could copy Spoke there and do Lotus, IMAP, POP, etc.

We also went after the enterprise market, and there were a host of competitors that came out after we got funded in July of 2002, including LinkedIn, Visible Path and Zerodegrees (acquired by IAC). LinkedIn was a pureplay personal network, and they, frankly, kicked everyone else’s ass with regard to creating a social network of stuture, as well as making money (seems to be doing well).

We pitched Esther Dyson (and got written up in Release 1.0). She subsequently became one of the first investors in VP after talking to all of us, judging an industry event where VP, LinkedIn and Spoke all went head to head (LinkedIn won judges panel and Spoke won audience votes) and getting the inside scoop on all this stuff from the folks she talked to. Nothing illegal, but a little annoying.

VisiblePath eventuially got funding from Kleiner, after we decided that Doll would be a better partner for growth (and that’s a decision that seems to have been for the best, given how much they’ve stood by Spoke). Ray Lane, the Kleiner partner seemed to draw from many of the analogies we gave him when pitching Spoke, in talking about VP after they came out with the news interestingly enough.

I love the idea behind all of this (and Plaxo, Ryze, SixDegrees and others have all played a part of this)…But what *we* found was that all the features and relationship strength information didn’t really draw as much interest as the large network that LinkedIn was growing. It demos great (hey check out Social Networking as idea of the year in Business 2.0 for 2003 with LinkedIn, ZeroDegrees and Spoke as the representatives), but the “less features, bigger network” does seem to be the way to go here.

Perhaps Visible Path should copy Spoke’s decision to try and sell information to sales teams, since Spoke has begun to actually make money this way.

They’ve copied everything else.

(Oh yeah, and any startup from New York that subsequently claims to be “Silicon Valey based” can kiss my native Palo Alto ass.)

Just sayin’….

Silicon Valley-based VisiblePath is a lot like LinkedIn, but it automatically determines who your real network is, and how strong each individual relationship is, based on your emails and calendar items that involve them….