LinkedIn is a social network that focuses on connection, as opposed to subject, activities, friends, etc. Connection in this sense does not really refer to you connecting to old friends or coworkers. It's really about connecting through your friend and coworkers to their friends and coworkers and so on. Think six degrees of seperation.

I recently asked on my company's blog, InteractiveQA.com, and on LinkedIn and on various lists "What's your social network strategy?" Specifically, I asked if people were on multiple networks, setting up their own, or participating at a corporate level on an existing network. The following is the result of those questions and my own thoughts and research.

A social network is simply a highly internetworked and active community. Frank Diana, Chief Product Officer at Aelera called it "an evolution of collaboration technologies."

Scott Wickham’s blog post “Social Networking and Buffy the Vampire Slayer” brought my attention to the post on TechCrunch “Bear Stearns: Yahoo Must Form A Social Networking Strategy.“ In short, the TechCrunch article summarizes and discusses a Bear Stearns Internet analyst’s view that Yahoo needs to get into the Social Networking space by acquiring someone like Facebook, different valuations of Facebook, and the reality that it might actually be Facebook acquiring Yahoo. Scott’s post questions the logic of Yahoo needing to acquire a social network, but more so, he’s really questioning what social networks bring that email and bulleting boards and the basic building blocks of the web don’t already bring us. 

Scott, Robert Peck (the Bear Stearns analyst), and Michael Arrington, the author of the TechCrunch post are all right in some sense. Yahoo needs to keep playing catch up to keep people using the services their empire offers. Yahoo needs to let people know they care about social networks. Facebook should leverage the valuation of their company by either being bought or acquiring. And, just like Web 2.0, the term Social Network, is really short hand for a number of things that have been out already, and there really isn’t one precise definition. 

Just as years ago, when the Web and the Internet were getting noticed beyond the early adopters we saw standardization and interoperability. Email systems could communicate with each other. Bulletin boards or forums, while different, were not as vastly different as they once were. And we came to understand what certain basic features were and the metaphors used to represent these features in the 2D not exactly real time world that is the Internet. Social networks offer this. We’re more connected to each other, and our friends, contacts and colleagues can keep track of what we’re doing. Some social networks even actually interoperate. The Facebook API offers ways to use Facebook authentication so you don’t need separate user names and passwords everywhere. Drupal, the open source content management system we use to build social networks has ways to allow authentication to work across sites. Others will share information on what you’re doing on your site or blog or even other networks. 

Is there value in acquiring an existing social network? Sure. You get an already active community. But in Yahoo’s case, they already have an active community and lots of features that draw users. Enhancing the connection between their properties and adding features might be enough. I’d encourage some restraint on their part, though. If you use Yahoo Mail I think you’ll understand my concerns of over using available technology.  

What about Facebook’s valuation? Just as with so many other players over the brief history of the Internet, there is a point for each niche when the valuation of top players hits an amazing high. I think this might be Facebook’s point, and they could really benefit from capitalizing on that. 

What about those who can’t afford to buy a $7 billion company, or don’t have the vast programming resources of a company like Yahoo? Amazing things are possible to those with significantly smaller budgets by using open source software like Drupal. We’re always excited to talk about what you could do with Drupal, so give us a call. What's your Social Networking strategy?

We build and test social networks, so it's important for us to know about them. It's also a good way to find clients, vendors, employees and great ideas. Some are good for one thing or another, some have particular features that are nice, some are annoying for certain things. I'd like to share a bit of my thoughts on various networks and get some input on what great networks are, what they're good for, and what could be done better.

Network: LinkedIn
URL: http://www.linkedin.com
My Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/joshmccormack
This is the network I've spent the most time on. It's useful in finding people to reach out to. Increasingly, through Answers, there is the possibility for discussion. Using InMail (subscription necessary) you can contact people outside of your network without introductions. You can import and export your connections, but only their names and email addresses. LinkedIn occasionally seems like it wants to be a CRM company, and it's not always clear whether it's meant as a way to manage existing relationships or build new ones. I tend toward the later interpretation.

Network: Xing
URL: http://www.xing.com
My Profile: https://www.xing.com/profile/Josh_McCormack
Often in business networking circles Xing is pitted as the competitor of LinkedIn, and the more international of the two. LinkedIn will dispute this, showing subscriber numbers. If you check out Xing you'll see why people would say it's international - a lot of it is not in English. It's growing a lot, and there's clearly the idea of discussion on this network. At this point I'm not doing a great deal with it, though.

Network: Ecademy
URL: http://www.ecademy.com/
My Profile: http://www.ecademy.com/account.php?id=185539
I'm putting the effort into this network more now to really try and find the value. The intensive push to sell premium level membership is certainly distracting. They seemed to have done the "someone looked at your profile, see who it was" thing really early.

Network: Orkut
URL: http://www.orkut.com/
My Profile: http://www.orkut.com/Profile.aspx?uid=14937149394234602413
I've barely used this network, so don't have much to say. It seems a lot more focused on personal relationships, and finding dates, which I'm not looking for.

Network: Facebook
URL: http://www.facebook.com/
My Profile: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=534476038
I think I'm too old and went to too big a school for this to really work for me. I have 12+ years on most of the people on this network. This one really emphasizes the importance of the population of the network over everything else.

I don't have a MySpace page, and don't know if I will. I just signed up at 43things.com and might use it. I've used Ryze in the past, but haven't looked at it in some time. Twitter is obviously hot, and while fairly different from some of the other networks, it deserves to be looked into (which I haven't much at all).

Here's a list from Wikipedia of social networks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites