The Evolution of Business Social Networks: Beyond LinkedInLinkedIn was the first social network I joined.
Before Facebook. Before Digg. (I never had a MySpace account, sorry.)
A friend I used to work with at The Miami Herald sent me an invitation to join his network. He wasn’t one for creating accounts any and everywhere, so I figured it was worth a look-see.
At first, I had a lame profile, barely filled out, but I was linking up with old colleagues and it was nice to catch up with folks I hadn’t talked to since college or my stints in Florida and Arizona. Eventually, it became a vital tool to use to connect with people I met at conferences, networking parties and other events.
And while I still believe LinkedIn is a vital tool for anyone who is serious about online networking, a couple of new business-focused social networks have sprung up of late that could – eventually – give LinkedIn a run for its money.
The Closed Network: Namesake
A friend got an invite to Namesake and was able to snag me one as well. For now, it’s an invitation-only, closed social network for entrepreneurs and digital denizens.
I’ll be honest here: I’m not 100 percent sold on it yet, but Namesake is intriguing.
It has some similarities to LinkedIn – it focuses on your professional life. You can follow people, add contacts as “industry contacts,” and post a version of your resume.
You can have conversations and they update in real-time. But unless you’re on Namesake at the moment, that doesn’t much matter.
A lot of people seem to wonder the same thing about Namesake, asking in various conversations, why Namesake exists, what makes it different than other networks. I’ll admit I have wondered the same.
This is why, however, I tend to be an early adopter and not a first adopter. There’s so much out there and everything seems cool and fun and different at first glance. So much fades away after not that much time, however, that I kind of let my friends and connections who are the first adopters separate the wheat from the chaff before I jump in.
Ah, the advantages of having friends who are OCD hipsters.
The differences were raised in sharp relief the other day, though, when someone asked about LinkedIn and whether people liked it. The consensus there was that it had its uses, but they were mostly passive. And that I couldn’t disagree with.
I just participated in the hands-on portion of a Columbia University Business School Alumni Club of New York panel that focused on LinkedIn, too, where I was talking to new users about why LinkedIn was important. And I do truly believe that.
It’s the first place recruiters go to when researching prospective employees. It’s a great resource to get answers to questions and to connect with people in similar fields whom you might never have met otherwise. And, as I mentioned, it’s a professional venue in which to connect with those people you meet at job fairs or networking events whom you might not want to connect with on Facebook, yet want to have a closer connection to than Twitter might allow.
And yet, it is almost old-school in its Web 2.0 cred.
Once Namesake moves out of Beta and invitation-only status, might it overtake LinkedIn? It feels like the next generation, in many ways.
In the words of the dearly departed Billy Mays, however: “But wait, there’s more!”
Hello, Hashable
Did I mention that I’m not a first adopter? I do, however, have to sign up for just about every service as soon as I hear about it so I have my profile in case I do want to join.
So when I heard about the beta of Hashable through Startup One Stop, I asked for a Beta invite. Worth checking out, at least, and making sure I had the good ol’ AmyVernon username.
I’ll admit, at first I didn’t really get it. It was like a cross between Twitter and LinkedIn, without the true functionality of either.
I signed up, filled out my profile, connected my Twitter account and promptly forgot about it.
As the days passed, however, more and more of my connections started talking about it. A party was planned for the NYC Top 100 Leaderboard. A party! And I wasn’t invited!
A friend intro’d me directly to the CEO, Mike Yavonditte, and he invited me to stop by their office for coffee next time I was in the city. So I took him up on the offer when I realized I was walking by their office building one day.
Mike gave me a walk-through of the service and I will admit I was intrigued. And I was even more intrigued when he told me the iPhone app was imminent. Mobile is key to any social networking these days.
The key here is that Hashable can help you track how and when you met people. And the more you connect with them through Hashable – whether by introducing them to other people, thanking them for an introduction, posting a meeting for coffee or business or lunch or whatever – the more Hashable connects the two of you. It tracks your relationships according to how many connections you’ve posted with that person.
And you can keep connections with people private so that Hashable knows you’ve had coffee with them approximately 80 times this month without broadcasting it. Hashable keeps track so your relationship status grows while not bothering everyone you know with all the gory details.
It integrates with Twitter, Foursquare, email (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL and others) and with the iPhone app allows you to post the connections easily as they occur, not having to deal with a mobile site or waiting ’til you get back home.
I feel convinced there’s a place for this service, though I admit I’m still mostly lurking. But every couple of days, I look at my Twitter and e-mail connections and find several more trusted folks who’ve joined up.
Which will be the heir apparent to LinkedIn? Will LinkedIn become the Friendster of business networking? At this point, I’d have to say no. But there’s go to be room for more than one major business social network, no?
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I got an invite to Hashable, but haven’t really explored it much, yet. I need to quit being a slacker and give it some attention. As for LinkedIn – I’ve realized I don’t utilize it nearly as much as I used to and this reminds me I need to update my profile. :-)
Definitely give it a shot. The founders have a track record, which is another thing that makes it a bit different.
Great post Amy!
Like you, the first social network (other than various forums I took part in) I joined was linkedIn. Just finding the date has been a chore as it’s so far back (27th December 2005) of course it was less social than it is now and the whole “social media” buzzword was yet to gain significance.
The linkedIn of 2005 is far removed from the linkedIn of 2010, but with very little in the way of competition perhaps their development has not been as fast as it could have been… I don’t have an invite to either hashable or namesake yet (hint, hint) but it will be great to see what they are bringing to the business social table!
What I find interesting, actually, is how little LinkedIn’s looks have changed since I joined, in 2006 or 2007 (can’t find my original e-mail from them!). There are lots of little details that have changed, but they’ve managed to not jar users with major UX overhauls. Yet it doesn’t look outdated, either.
Oh, and welcome to Hashable. :-)
Amy,
I think that developing a working social network outside of the existing ecosphere of Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter is very difficult and not very likely to succeed. I speak from a position of knowledge because I worked at Ripple6 where we created independent private label social networks for Fortune 500 clients. We tried and failed to sell the concept of building private networks (yes we were bought by Gannett, but since then the company has nearly dissolved.) I think with Facebook passing into the mainstream at 0.5B members we’ve passed that particular tipping point. The only way I see for any new networks to make headway is as adjuncts to existing services with features that they can’t easily add. For that reason I find Hashable interesting but only mildly so. It will be interesting to see what comes down the pike. But IMHO the die is cast for the time being. A lot of companies have taken a run at Google and failed, I think Facebook is in that same position now.
Chris
You raise a lot of good points, Chris. The thing I think Hashable has going for it is the mobile aspect, and the ability to track relationships you have with people. There are folks on LinkedIn whom I have no recollection of how I met. On Hashable, if you meet them and # it, you can go back in your relationship with them and easily track when/where/how.
Is that enough to matter in the grand scheme of things? Not sure. If I were sure (and right), however, I’d be rich and sipping cocktails on an island in Tahiti. Or maybe Fiji.
As for Namesake, I think the key thing there for now is that it’s small and closed and invite-only. There was a whole discussion there today about this piece and particularly on what Namesake actually is. To the members there so far, it’s a place to have discussions in real-time. They all believe in the importance of LinkedIn, but in a different way. It was a really interesting discussion.
It’s a wonder to me that Facebook doesn’t yet have a professional side, especially, since Zuckerberg is intent on keeping users in the Facebook environment as much as possible. No doubt they are already pondering it.
On the surface I do like Hashable’s connection tracking idea. At least you have a track of how often you’ve met with someone. But, do you really need a social network tool to tell you if a real life business relationship is bearing fruit? I suppose for those professionals that need a helping hand with keeping in touch, it’s worthwhile. For someone that’s more relationship driven, it’s a slick bell and whistle feature than a critical selling point.
That’s a great point, Michelle. I think the update to Facebook pages will see more of that from the business side of things – not quite the “professional” side of things, which is a different point, of course. I think part of it, however, is that people do have this mental deliniation between their professional and their “real” life, despite the fact that the line is rather artificial and easier to cross than ever these days.
They’d have to make the privacy and account settings much much simpler on Facebook for anyone to feel comfortable enough to use it for both personal and professional networking, I think.
I agree with you, Hashable is a great service and it’s even better when it comes to using it on iPhone. I made my profile here and now I am also seeing many of my friends join it with the passage of time.
Great Article Amy! as more and more social media channels popping out, I have started using awesomize.me for both my personal & corporate reputation management leveraging my trusted peers. Are you on them? I didn’t find you. What do you think of them? Looking forward to hearing your feedback.
Thanks for your comment, Kamran. I hadn’t heard of awesomize.me until you mentioned it. I did hop on there and claim my name, but haven’t had a chance to really look through it yet. I’ll have to check it out. I also got invited to Chambers over the weekend, which is in closed beta right now. Not sure what that’s about, either. I suppose I’ll have to do a follow-up post down the road.
Amy, I just read this on their blog page. It looks like they just posted it. It explains it all
awesomize.me Poised To be the Intelligent Platform for the Social Media:
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with the start of 2011, i have been hearing a lot about hashable and still couldnt figure out how best i could use it….I guess over a period of time i would.
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