Good idea, but tough to pull off. In these kind of deals its always features vs community. Keep the features simple and you have a large community…do vice versa and get the opposite results.

typo: the title of this post says “VISUALPath”, whereas the rest of the article talks of VISIBLEPath.

does it? i don’t see that.

thanks for pointing it out.

Thanks for this post. Even domain name is very intutive.

Regards,
RaJ
http://www.suggestusability.com

typo in RSS feed also : the title of this post says “VISUALPath”, whereas the rest of the article talks of VISIBLEPath

Any word on a Mac version of the software?

I haven’t touched Outlook in 2 years, having switched over completely to Gmail & Gcal, as have several colleagues. Others prefer Firebird and such. I don’t see Outlook continuing to dominate the business world forever; hopefully VisiblePath with integrate other services and applications.

ohh…go ahead, give him a kiss mike

These guys have been around for a few years now, steadily building their business up. Its not just another web 2.0 jokefest. Its a great product.

So it only works properly if you use Microsoft Outlook?
Personally, I think the whole idea of basing a networking tool on frequency of emails is complete crap. Most of my email traffic is with people in the same office (I work at a big bank and exchange a few emails every day with some people). Most of my useful contacts are from places I worked at previously. I don’t use my work email to keep in touch with these people, I use my private email address (which doesn’t change when I change jobs).

The reviewer says he’s polluted his LinkedIn account by including a lot of useless non-contacts. He concludes that LinkedIn is useless. The correct conclusion is that he’s made his LinkedIn account useless by his own actions. Tip to LinkedIn users: never add anyone to your LinkedIn contacts, if that person already has 100 or more contacts. You’ll just be adding a contact-collector like Mr Gonzalez. By leaving such people out, your network will grow much more slowly, but it will be useful.

The real killer, though, is that dependency on Microsoft Outlook. Not everyone wants to live their lives in the shadow of the Microsoft monopoly.

Looks like the site is down (atleast it’s not loading up for me)! TechCrunch overload?

In addition to all the issues mentioned here is that there is an issue with many corporate policies on installing and using such toolbars. This is why I don’t use the LinkedIn Outlook toolbar even though I think its quite nifty.

In the end it is interesting the conclusion was drawn that VisiblePath is useful, and LinkedIn is not. I ask, how useful is a network without critical mass? No offense but I think the business social network space will find itself in the Facebook scenario. You may unleash all the nice features you want but the king of Business Professional Social Networking has been crowned and its LinkedIn.

To unseat them it will take more than nice features, LinkedIn will have to do something very wrong. I suspect professionals are less inclined to switch to the new network du jour than most demographics.

thank you veryy veryy nıce very nice….

Some interesting points there, particularly about the origin of your email account (i.e. if you email people from your gmail, or worse if you send them web clips etc.) then those interactions aren’t captured. Something that might be easy to underestimate is “the power of serendipity”. On linked-in i sometimes see contacts of contacts and go, “Hey, maybe we should talk to those guys”. I think the guys in http://www.teqlo.com are working on a feature that allows you to mash your Linked-in contacts with other applications, so maybe the proper domain for all this will be a “zillow for contacts” etc.

Though the implementation is interesting it also makes me wonder whether email conversations is the best measure.

For me I use mail only when necessary, I prefer to call people as the interaction is more direct and personal. To be even more precise, with the people I’ve got the best connection I hardly email, but call them frequently.

I agree with the comments stating email measurements can’t solve this problem. I particularly dislike the “atrophy” idea. Some of my strongest contacts exist in the “real world”, where our families get together and play at barbecues. And yet, we might only pass three or four emails a year back and forth.

Or what if I work with someone one year on a team, we forge a strong relationship, but stop communicating regularly because we move off to different projects. I would imagine our relationship is still rather strong.

Mike,
I am a satisfied LinkedIn user; and don’t think your arguments against it hold much water. What was that about ’social pressure’ and having to accept invitations? How do you avoid it in Visiblepath?

And the dependence on Outlook to determine who my first degree contacts are! What is the big value here? I can look at my 200 odd contacts and easily tell which are my “core” ones.

Giri

Most of these comments are spot on — the M$ problem, etc. Let me add one other thing: The idea of having a company scan through my e-mails to determine connections is just creepy.

Using Seth Godin’s rule, this seems to be solving a problem that I don’t really know I have. I mean, LinkedIn could do a better job of presenting some of the connections, but I don’t feel like I have a problem of not being able to use the tool because LinkedIn doesn’t know which of my connections are “courtesy” links.

i like linkedin, lets see this new one works out. I am going to signup for this.

How can I access LinkedIn’s “relationship map”?

yeah - guess This company will give no credit to Linked in? - hmm :/

I am looking forward to this opening up. I do not like the fact that some of these services require a “corporate” address vs. a personal one. As more and more services crop up it makes it harder to “take” your identities with you if you move or change jobs. In your case @techcrunch.com is your own, vs @startup is not. I believe that using a personal email or gmail account would lower chances of entry into the service…until they open it up.

I think visiblePath has an uphill battle to gain a foothold within the professional contact market. I think it will take a bit more than cool sorting features to make folks who have invested time to acquire 100+ contacts in linked in to move.

I certainly don’t want to bother my professional contacts every time a new professional network comes out.

Something interesting and uable for me would be for visiblePath to be a mashup that takes in linkedin contacts. That would make me want to join.

Build something customers want.

Someone tell me the last Webbish fad that featured a proprietary component that went anywhere because as far as I remember there isn’t one.

My sources which have extremely credible inside knowledge of this company tell me both that:

1. Management is solid at raising capital and weak at almost everything else. Apparently they have a history of vastly over-promising and under-delivering to clients, investors, employees and the like; and that

2. Their platform simply does not deliver on what they claim it does. This is for a few reasons surrounding their core (and arguably flawed) underlying thesis that email relationships and email volume = real world relationships and accurate levels of strength thereof. Some results of this misguided postulation, for example, being:

a. Massively overstated relationship strength with people who share your work email domain;
b. Mailing Lists which you may be a party to can show up as people entities; and
c. If you are regularly copied on community-wide mailing lists, the platform can interpret this to mean that you are close friends with everyone else on community list, even despite that this may not be the case at all.

My knowledge of this company runs pretty deep and leads me to believe it has some deep-rooted issues, both in man and machine. One might question, for example, why so much capital had to be raised just to get to launch. Such a question might provide some initial understanding about the disparity between management claims versus execution.

I never wish bad things on any startup and it is possible I do not have the full picture here. But red flags run a plenty.

A final comment to Mike Arrington: Mike, you are publishing what is arguably the most important blog of this industry. You are providing an invaluable service to any self-respecting entrepreneur, a task which carries great influence and responsibility (something you clearly understand) and you are to be complimented for your efforts.

This being said, sometimes I find myself wishing you would take more time to test third-party opinions before making assertions about the superiority or inferiority of a product or predicting its inevitable demise or success. I may be way off the mark here, but I sense that your research/writing process looks something like this:
-Give management great freedom to persuade you about their products. -Gain incredible (very impressive) knowledge of such products.
-Incorporate this knowledge into your existing understanding of the world and/or research competitive and/or relevant products/trends to supplant any knowledge gaps.
-Write
(I’m sure I’ve glossed over the tireless levels of research that get sprinkled overtop and between these steps ad nauseum).

Anyway, what I often find is missing and what I would like to see more often in your posts, is a move one step closer toward traditional standards of journalistic excellence, in which someone with a counter point - or simply with real, third-party credibility - is called on to express a view — a view that is then incorporated into your posts. I think the accuracy and/or credibility of your opinion will increase dramatically if you broaden your due diligence to include discussion with nay-sayers or other arms length people in advance of your posts.

I know you don’t shy away from public debate (simply look at your recent “trash-TC” contest), but it would be nice to see some of this debate happening before you post an article, rather than simply leaving it to retrospective, post-publishing comments and blog-dialogue, trackbacks etc to debate your point of view after the fact. I think this becomes increasingly important as your readership grows and with it, I am assuming here, the potentially enormous disparity between people who read your initial post and form an opinion, versus the potentially much smaller subset of people who take the time to follow up on such posts, read the comments, read the counterpoints on other blogs etc.

I’m a bit confused as to what will be “launched” at Web 2.0.

Visible Path is a 5-year old company, they started around the same time as:
- Spoke Software (they were the first)
- Leverage Software
- there was a 4th, sold early, can’t remember the name.

Last year when they picked up their series-B, all of a sudden it’being featured as the Next Big Thing left and right. Sometimes they are labeled “market leader” - but then again, what is it they are to launch next week?

Am I the only one that thinks you should accept everyone on LinkedIn, if you know them to any extent?

Then should a referral take place, you can then verbally verify the relationship with whoever.

Or have I misunderstood how it is supposed to work?

I understand the concept of social pressure. I was on the sending side on LinkedIn. I didn’t mean to put on the pressure, but now that I see this article I realize that is what I did. I put pressure on a old acquaintence to add me as a contact. I felt a bit ackward about it and almost wanted to undo what I did, but it was too late.

I know I’m not the only one who has felt the sting of rejection. Have you ever gone up to someone at a conference and been snubbed? Maybe they were trying to schmooze some industry experts and they just don’t have time for you.

Either that, or they just don’t want to corrupt their LinkedIn pool. They might need you someday and as Nick mentioned, they might have just made an enemy. Well, maybe not an enemy, but it may have prevented a useful relationship or just “took it down a notch” if you know what I mean.

Indeed, these guys are old. Maybe what’s new is the B2C angle.

Last I heard of them they were operating solely in the corporate space; selling to VP of sales with large direct sales forces. There promise was to help sales people open leads quicker and close sales by leveraging relationship capital.

I think this is an interesting feature not a business.
The functionality is trivial. The trick is owning the content.
The content is already owned by salesforce.com, Plaxo, LinkedIn and others in this space.

From one day to the other, Salesforce.com can own this market if they add some “find me the link” functionality to their CRM products. Siebel and others could do this too.

For the B2C space I agree with comments above that it’s pointless. I can just look at my Address Book and see who I’m connected with. And, I definitely don’t want to share my Address Book connections with anybody.

I’m surprised VisiblePath hasn’t landed a trade sale in all their years of operation. There must be some issues with their platform. They must have to deal with nightmare integration problems with different contact databases (Lotus, Outlook, Salesforce, proprietary), with names spelled differently (J Smith, John Smith, Johnny Smith) with titles out of date (chap is promoted in June, some records show old title)

PS: What if Microsoft sucked in all the world’s Outlook info into a mega-peta-duper-sized database? With 95% penetration they’d be able to determine the world’s connectivity. Eerie.

I agree that using email frequency and meetings as a proxy for importance/rating is misleading, doubly so for Outlook which is exclusively used for my current work environment. The people I value most in my business or social network is pretty much an independent variable. It’s funny that a simple rating graphic isn’t incorporated to any of these services, although LinkedIn’s recommendation feature is probably close qualitatively.

The site looks great — but is the service actually helping people develop better relationships with their co-workers? Is it possible to develop and algorithm that can “with a high level of confidence” suggest a correct decision? There are many “qualitative” factors that comprise relationships whereas visiblepath hopes to select a few variables that will be the justification of your decision? Can’t we just be candid about where we want to go with all people?

So basically this just tells you who you communicate with most at work?

What if there’s someone you HATE but HAVE to communicate with a work? Would this app call them a valuable contact?

Without taking into account phone calls and physical interaction (which is close to impossible), this is just an Outlook email traffic analyzer.

If you could combine this functionality with LinkedIn, that might be neat. Basically, if LinkedIn offered this app as a download that you could use to add an “email activity” scale to each LinkedIn contact that could be cool.

You have to exchange emails, carry out meetings, or provide a deep level of contact information on their vCard to show a real relationship.

So the computer can understand my relationship with people by getting the context out of email? I’ll believe it when I see it. Maybe it can do simple filtering based on if a company / person was sending me a PR release or I was on a mailing list of their but I can’t see it doing much more than that.

Plus does this mean that VisiblePath is getting a copy of all my incoming and outgoing email? Doesn’t that present some legal problems?

LinkedIn is one of the most useful business services developed in the past few years, and as already mentioned in a few comments, the size and comprehensiveness of its network is where a lot of its value is. So claiming that VisiblePath can be more useful than LinkedIn with no users in its network is a tad ridiculous.

Disclosure: I have no interest in LinkedIn, though Reid Hoffman is a dear friend. I passed on the investment opportunity way back when because I was not convinced of the monetization potential, and have been kicking myself for it ever since.

Jeff - Reid is also a friend, but I have never gotten a single valuable moment out of LinkedIn. I believe people who say it’s great for sales purposes, or doing background checks on potential hires, but from my perspective all it is is a way to spam bloggers.

Just because Reid’s a great guy and a friend doesn’t mean I’m not going to say what I think about it.

i think the link to VisiblePath near the top of this article needs a “www.” before the url?

Zoli it’s how the Web 2.0 world works:

“Last year when they picked up their series-B, all of a sudden it’being featured as the Next Big Thing left and right. Sometimes they are labeled “market leader” - but then again, what is it they are to launch next week?”

Companies in the Web industry just aren’t written about or fawned over unless they raise capital, regardless of how compelling or interesting their offering is. My company has turned down investments because money in the bank is better than debt any day of the week, but maybe we should have taken them so people would ooh and ahh. VisiblePath’s user interface design looks like 10 steps backwards from LinkedIn, I don’t care what extra feature they drop in there, it just looks terrible.

Deleting comments, eh Mike? I must be right.

I’ll say it again…. [deleted]

VC funding is not debt financing.

He who trolls shouldn’t expect his comments to be worth much. I didn’t mind the fact that it was deleted.

jawdawg - sorry dude. you’re going to have to get your own blog if you want to accuse me of unethical behavior.

Thanks for the advice Mike!!!

http://techcrunchwatch.wordpress.com/

Zoli - VisiblePath was primarily focused on the Enterprise market for its product and seems like its following the consumer hype and trying to launch the same product for the masses!! After raising $22.7 MM it might not have found a large enough market in the enterprise world. Also, LinkedIn’s success might have forced them to change their strategy a bit.

Its an interesting idea which works in a limited manner as noted by many commentators that just mining email is not enough to understand your relationships. Also, I might work most closely with my manager and team at a company but might not send them too many emails as they are “right around the corner” to have a direct conversation with. Instead, VisiblePath will tell me that I have a “weak” relationship with them while a high one with a Sales professional in my company who I dont see too often and hence communitcate via email.

From Michael’s comparison of VisiblePath to LinkedIn, it seems that the company is going after the professional market with a consumer angle. Again, its hard to fathom a successful product if it only works with Outlook. One will need integration with Gmail, Yahoo, IM to make it work effectively. Then again the system will need to differentiate “friends” from “professional friends”?

Mike, I will always respect you for not letting your personal relationships get in the way of your writing - you have shredded enough of my own startups for me to appreciate that :-).
I did not write my comment in support of Reid, he is a big boy who can defend himself, I just voiced my support of LinkedIn the service which I have found tremendously helpful in my day to day work.

Mike,
It seems wierd to evaluate the usefulness of a service (linked-in) from a perspective of whether you or Nick, in this case, find it useful. In this case, Nick had a way of dealing with invitations that prevented him from getting good benefits out of it, and presumably Visible Path can solve that specific issue.

So the title of the blog post should probably be
“VisiblePath Is A Lot Like LinkedIn, Except It’s Useful, To Me”

As said many times, LinkedIn works great if you are selective of who you “let in” and respectful of other people. I use it for recruiting (it has been very helpful) and networking (helpful there are well). I share a lot of the concerns cited by others (difficulty in removing contacts, canceling, etc), but those things are cosmetic and fixable.

Wow, I’m late to the comment party.

Vijay,

We couldn’t fit that title all into one line

I think a lot of other people find their linked in contacts meaningless. Being connected to someone doesn’t tell me how strong a relationship is. I’m certain that Tom doesn’t go out for a beer with all his 100+ million friends.

And as to Jeff’s point. The Outlook plugin will cause the network to grow. Email is highly viral and would provide a great way to spread it.