Or why LinkedIn doesn’t cut it as a social network…

A while ago John Breslin [1] pointed me towards a presentation [2] at Reboot 7 by Jyri Engeström [3] of Jaiku [3] on object centered sociality. The main point of this thesis is that the best social networks are centered on shared objects of interest. Rather than viewing a social network as a mapping of relationships between people he argues that successful social networks connect people through shared objects. These social objects are the reason people connect to each other and they cause people to participate in and return to the network. Some examples are:

• Photos (flickr)
• Bookmarks (del.icio.us)
• Opinions/discussion (blogging, forums)
• Video (youtube)
• Music (last.fm, myspace)
• Events (Upcoming)
• Dates (hotornot)

There have been a slew of new social networks appearing on Techcrunch in recent months. There have especially been a lot of niche social networks appearing. I suspect that the success of each of these will depend on how much the objects at the center of the network encourage social interaction.

As an example of what happens when there is an absence of social objects Jyri quotes Russell Beattie’s [4] post about linking out of linked-in [5]. Without social objects users turn the process of connecting itself into a social object. But this doesn’t last. Russell describes how the only way that he ever interacted with LinkedIn was to approve invite requests.

This mirrored my own experience of using LinkedIn. I’m currently on my second LinkedIn profile. When I initially joined I added some people that I know into my network. Once I’d done this I had no reason to use it. After a few weeks of not using it I deleted my account. A while later I opened a new account since I kept getting sporadic invites from people. I don’t use it but I accept invitations from people who want to add me to their network (This hasn’t happened much lately - these days invitations seem to come from Facebook).

Maybe LinkedIn is useful to other people. If your business is networking or recruiting I can see how it would be a very useful tool. However is seems to have limited usefulness to most people. How does one participate in Linked-in apart from adding contacts? I’d be interested in other people’s usage patterns for LinkedIn. How do regular users of LinkedIn use it? Please leave a comment if you use LinkedIn other than to accept invites from people.

In fact I think that Linked-in is not really a social networking application. In the classical sense it is - it lets you define the network of people that you know. But in the Web 2.0 era social network has come to mean more than that. It is now about interacting and communicating with people in your network rather than just listing them. Linked-in has become a static resource. It’s more of an online CV publishing tool. You can publish your CV and push it towards people who might be interested in it.

Recently Paul Walsh [6] announced [7] on twitter that he was abandoning LinkedIn for Facebook causing a bunch of my twitter contacts to open Facebook accounts. While I find the Facebook software to have lots of shortcomings, the major plus is that it has opened an API to let developers create applications that plug into Facebook. This has led to a huge boost [8] in Facebook traffic lately. Hopefully this will encourage other social network applications to open up.

LinkedIn have already hinted that they plan to make an API available but not for 9 months. One can imagine all sorts of interesting applications could be built on top of LinkedIn’s data if they made it available through an API. I would like to see them do this soon. In 9 months or a year it may be too late as inertia sets in. Attracting people back to a service once they’ve left is much more difficult than attracting new users in the first place.