LinkedIn is a fabulous business research tool that helps me to find new contacts and learn more about those I already know. Measure the value of a network by what it enables people to accomplish, not the cleverness of its features.

- Dean S.

And nobody seems to be asking , how much is the IBM lady charging her client to solve the problem?

She reminds me of a newspaper exec in 2000 dismissing Craigs list as not a threat to classifieds.

It’s not that IBM can’t do it better now, it’s just they charge 1000 x what it will cost to do that job in 10 years time,

People like sharing photos, videos, etc. and Facebook enables that.

Hope that helps.

http://www.cnti.../companies.html

for me LinkedIn has been a very useful tool for staying connected with people I know and finding out what changes in their career occur.
I like the fact that most of them really invest time to compose a detailed profile – it means the site is perceived as professional and opinion building.
The feature of searching for people, with its many functionalities, is one of the strongest points for the portal.
Also the discussions are for me absolutely priceless – especially those about different aspects of business. What I like about them is that they do really provide valuable information and not crap like on many other sites.

So you would expect people to start trading the high value stuff first, and that is what is happening. I imagine folks will start doing accomodation/space next (LinkedIn is pretty good on zipcode search) and will work their way down to minor detail like outsourcing IT or financial services later.

Not sure why anyone would be scared about traffic going down when they are growing so strongly internationally. I imagine they are much more worried about whether they are going to manage to add on most of India without a massive service failure. Maintaining service levels from a cloud computing platform with a free entry price must be a nightmare.

Matt

Seems like technology device and platform choices are about as much fun for self-definition as choices of musical influences (see http://www.yout...h?v=3paf2TLrgsg).

Not to burst your bubble – but faceted search at LinkedIn is the brainchild of Igor Perisic (the Director of Search there: http://www.link.../in/igorperisic ), and John Wang (”the Duke” of Search: http://www.link...com/in/javasoze ), and required no new “science”.

Faceted search is a mostly “solved problem”, which is a difficult engineering exercise to scale properly, is nothing new.

Linkedin Polls are very useful for finding a certain segment of folks and asking a hard question under time constraints. Is it free? Sure, but the pay version is what moves.

In vetting, you cannot trust Linkedin alone but it does go a long way to forming the basis of some amount of candidate research. It’s helpful for tracking and keeping up with the people that are outside of a pleasure lifestyle focused social network.

IBM ads by in large miss the point in how a social network value is determined. The drive by query by an exec is humorous but it is unlikely the kid would give a “duh” answer.

For example, in the case above, a cursory Linkedin search (absent the new feature mentioned in this article) would yield 135 candidates which a good intern could refine quickly if they were able to break apart the list — and probably yield 4-5 solid hits.

By contrast, a greater international representation for Cantonese might be found on XING

http://www.crun...om/company/xing

Btw, the guy in the ad. He doesn’t look like he has any friends.