Weblog: Blog: LinkedIn

Scott Allen actually took the words out of my mouth on FOAF:
http://www.onlinebusinessnetworks.com/blog/2004/05/19/100-ceo-blogs-linkedin-and-foaf

And, while, yes, while I certainly wouldn't just give away customer relationships (being a man about this), I believe that customers are kept most happy by giving them functionality.

And, frankly, I remain unconvinced of any FOAF application that I've seen thus far. (Including, my regrets, the one posted here.) If there was a web-app that I could offer my customers, that having FOAF would enable me, then I would do it -- if it was good enough to be a high priority.

And no feature is free Marc -- it all takes work. (Release, QA, plan with security, analyze corner cases, etc.) Hopefully you'll blog about Scott's post above... best thing that I've seen on FOAF in a blog yet.

Each of the Red Herring 100 companies have their own Weblog for conversations with event participants.

Click on Weblogs above, use the Pull-down Bar to find a company in alphabetical order, then click New Blog Post to post on a weblog.

The clear -- and killer -- application for FOAF is Go_Ogle.

Why?

See our Microsoft-approved business plan

Excerpt:

Go-Ogle utilizes open standards for encoding information about social networks. Specifically, linkages between people will be encoded in the Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF) dialect of RDF, a Web standard for formatting information. Static personal profile data will also be encoded in FOAF. Better still, Go_Ogle supports the use of web logs, or blogs, as a kind of 'living' personal profile (in the 'living document' sense). Here Go-Ogle will utilize Atom, an extensible XML dialect which maps losslessly to RDF and is the emerging standard for blog content metadata.

Go-Ogle's use of these standards will leave users in control of their information, and shift the basis of competition away from trying to lock in users via proprietary encodings, and (largely) to the quality of sites' search/navigation features (see Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Solution for details on this archetypal form of 'value chain migration').

How do we make money and achieve sustainable competitive differentiation?

Two excerpts:

First excerpt:
------------------------------

Neuroscientists have determined that the nucleus accumbens, the part of the brain that gives rise to psychological addiction, is fired by increased prospects of professional success, romance and laughs (PSRL).

The more a company does to increase PSRL, then, the more satisfied, loyal and eager-to-spend its customers will be.

Today, a state-of-the-art provider of PSRL-increasing services -- in OSG parlance, a provider of customized lifelong learning and career services (CLLCS) -- can achieve runaway market leadership in three stages:

1. Supply fee-based virtual internships (i.e. the intern pays, like people pay for certification training, test prep, etc.) that will prepare interns to work for private equity firms that specialize in corporate turnarounds. This internship program will be the first of its kind, and will appeal to the most desirable CLLCS consumers: people who aspire to be CxOs (CEOs, CFOs, COOs, CIOs, etc.) of next-generation companies (i.e. Digital Organizations (.pdf)).

2. Synergize the internship program (and subsequent professional success-increasers) with romance- and laughs-increasing services. Also synergize the romance- and laughs-increasers. Each class of offering, then, will increase demand for the others. These positive feedbacks will lock in 1.0 clients.

3. Lock in 2.0 clients by providing unique opportunities to network -- professionally and socially -- with 1.0 clients (who will happily cooperate, as doing so will enhance their CLLCS pedigree). Lock in 3.0ers via access to 1.0ers and 2.0ers, and so on.

Second excerpt:
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OSG's internships for 1.0ers will be set at our online social networking service, code-named Go-Ogle.

The earliest internships will focus on Go-Ogle's leading-edge technology for searching social networks, which is also a 'must-use' in corporate turnarounds.

We will market our interns, suppliers, intern employers, Go-Ogle and OSG through profitable comedy programming, online and on television. The initial television program -- The Secret Life of Windows of Opportunity -- will center on the comic plight of OSG's CEO: like many men, he wants to succeed in my professional life and also be the best boyfriend, and later husband and father, he can. In his case, achieving this balance:

• is complicated by the magnitude of the stakes in the early CLLCS market.

• will be further complicated by OSG-affiliated actresses and models, who will routinely employ their beauty, their charms more generally, and the latest innovations from the burgeoning sciences of enhancing desirability, to make a favorable impression on him.

The online complement to the sitcom -- Windows of Opportunity -- will chronicle, among other storylines, the variations on the CEO's experience that will characterize interactions between OSG-affiliated actors/actresses/models and OSG employees at all levels of the company.

Sitcom development is underway. See the Better MySpace TV group I started at MySpace.

Note the Membership section ;-)

My response to Reid

This appears in my Blog Marc's Voice

Note that you can network with Red Herring attendees using LinkedIn Groups

http://www.linkedin.com
RH100 TAKE The latest craze in the hip world of
Internet communication is social networking. And at
the center of the excitement is LinkedIn, which has
the powerful backing of the seasoned Sequoia
Capital. What’s more, LinkedIn has attracted 20,000
hiring managers to its service and has spread to 80
countries and more than 120 industries. The big
question still staring down LinkedIn and other online
services designed to help professionals find one
another is – how will these companies make money?
Ignoring that big, looming question, LinkedIn has
attracted a slew of customers and has a core group of
leaders like Reid Hoffman that makes the company
all the more viable and interesting. One concern:
Google’s foray into the social networking world.

What are the new features you have planned? What is your view about RSS and its place in your social network?

Ah, the FOAF question. And from my favorite FOAFer.

I have something of a "wait and see" approach to FOAF these days. I'm generally supportive and interested in innovative applications of Open Source development and business models. However, @ LinkedIn, we can release one medium feature every 3 weeks or so; big features take longer; smaller features are put alongside. So, doing FOAF would require that I (for the moment) do not do some other feature for that time. And, we have a number of features planned that we think will add more value to a higher percentage of our user base (e.g. the ability to post job listings to your network) than FOAF will be.

When we see applications that we can integrate or add to our offering by adding FOAF, or other value that adds to the quality of the service we provide,

I know that there are people out there, Marc being representative, who would strongly prefer all online services. I'm curious: I know that some of these services have FOAF on the drawing board, but is there any clear application for it yet? (E.g. I had heard that Living Directory has implemented it, but cannot find it and if it's there, how are users using it?)

I guess here's the short-hand: we'll add FOAF when it seems to be the next most important feature to add in our list. And, not seeing an immediate application for it (we have two years of features to build, all of which have immediate application), I'm not certain it's any time in the near future.

So why won't you open up your social net by supporting FOAF?

Do you think that people will want to lock their digital profiles within your walled garden/data silo? Don't you realize that others will offer teh same servcies - but open?

Isn't that rather old school thinking?

Yes - yes - we've heard the answer that YOUR social net, with it's exclusive roster of Type-A characters is better than anyone else's social net, but all the more reason than to do the right thing.

So why won't you open up your social net by supporting FOAF?

Do you think that people will want to lock their digital profiles within your walled garden/data silo?

Isn't that rather old school thinking?