Ok, the title to this post sounds arro­gant and I don’t mean it to … read on.

Kon­stan­tin Guer­icke, LinkedIn’s VP Mar­ket­ing, announced at the Web 2.0 con­fer­ence a deal with AOL to inte­grate pres­ence ser­vice onto their pro­file, as per this cita­tion from Forbes:

LinkedIn Cor­po­ra­tion, oper­a­tor of the world’s largest busi­ness net­work, today announced that it has signed an agree­ment with Amer­ica Online, Inc. to inte­grate its AIM® ser­vice into LinkedIn to pro­vide LinkedIn users with AIM pres­ence infor­ma­tion, so that they can eas­ily see when their LinkedIn con­nec­tions are online and avail­able for real-time com­mu­ni­ca­tions. This new capa­bil­ity for instant text, voice and video com­mu­ni­ca­tion will give the more than 3.8 mil­lion LinkedIn users a new way to main­tain and strengthen their rela­tion­ships with rel­e­vant busi­ness con­tacts, such as clients, busi­ness part­ners and for­mer co-workers.

Reid Hoff­man, CEO of LinkedIn [says:]“By pro­vid­ing AIM pres­ence infor­ma­tion within LinkedIn, we pro­vide our mem­bers with another vehi­cle for main­tain­ing and strength­en­ing exist­ing busi­ness relationships.”

For an exam­ple of a pres­ence server, this blog (cur­rently) indi­cates my Skype pres­ence on the right side­bar. (As you read the blog, you know whether I’m con­nected on Skype or not, and whether I’m avail­able for a call or away from the com­puter. In this sense, the blog acts as my extended, vir­tual self (my aug­mented pres­ence), and the var­i­ous post­ings are top­ics we may talk about or chat about at greater length, if any are of inter­est to you as well. Alter­na­tively, you may leave me a com­ment, which is an asyn­chro­nous form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion.) Like­wise, my pro­file on LinkedIn will also indi­cate my AOL pres­ence when the com­pa­nies imple­ment the announced part­ner­ship. LinkedIn pro­files are “sta­tic” biogra­phies which rarely get updated, while blogs are “dynamic” per­son­al­i­ties that evolve con­tin­u­ally, accord­ing to the author’s rhythm of posting.

The announced pres­ence indi­ca­tor starts to make com­mu­ni­ca­tions more fluid on the noto­ri­ously “rigid” LinkedIn. To date, you could con­tact or con­nect with some­one through the sys­tem, but would then have to con­tinue com­mu­ni­ca­tions off the LinkedIn plat­form, through e-mails. This is in con­trast to many other social net­works, includ­ing OpenBC, Ecad­emy, Orkut and par­tic­u­larly aSmall­World, which has had a pres­ence server and chat forum for a while now.

Also, as a par­tic­i­pant on Vin­cent Wright’s very active 2,200+ mem­ber MyLinked­In­Pow­er­Fo­rum (MLPF), I’ve read and con­tributed to ongo­ing dis­cus­sions on what leads peo­ple con­nect to each other. Many dis­cus­sions cen­ter on Mark Gra­novet­ter “The strength of weak ties” the­ory, in which he argues that “weak ties, e.g. the con­nec­tions between col­leagues, acquain­tances etc., are more impor­tant for per­sonal advance­ment, such as get­ting good jobs, than the strong ties of fam­ily and friend­ship.” (from Wikipedia). The point is, how do you meet these weak ties? 

• LinkedIn’s phi­los­o­phy so far has been to favor link­ing with peo­ple you have met and main­tain rela­tion­ships with. As your net­work grows, you can start to iden­tify and con­nect with peo­ple based on your direct connections’s rec­om­men­da­tions and in the­ory, you are sep­a­rated by any­one else on earth by just 6 peo­ple (“degrees”) on average.

 

• An alter­nate phi­los­o­phy, referred to as “object-centered social­ity”, main­tains that you often meet peo­ple through shared inter­ests. For instance, you might exchange cards and con­duct busi­ness with some­one at a pro­fes­sional con­fer­ence, with­out iden­ti­fy­ing who you know in com­mon. Much, if not most, of busi­ness occurs this way, as do other parts of social life. Although it’s pos­si­ble to be a mem­ber of the same pro­fes­sional group on LinkedIn, it’s far from the pre­ferred way of con­nect­ing with oth­ers. In fact, it has been eas­ier to get to know peo­ple at MLPF and later con­nect­ing with them at LinkedIn. Through dis­cus­sions on top­ics of com­mon inter­est, we can estab­lish a mean­ing­ful direct con­nec­tion on LinkedIn, with­out both­er­ing to fig­ure out who can link us up. This activ­ity occurs off the LinkedIn plat­form, unfortunately*.

As such, LinkedIn con­tin­ues to be a bet­ter place to refer­ring peo­ple to for an online resume and endorse­ments, rather than for strength­en­ing your rela­tion­ship with them by com­mu­ni­cat­ing with them. The AOL pres­ence server will help in this respect as well, by sug­gest­ing a com­mon plat­form on which to com­mu­ni­cate. Although I pre­fer chat­ting on Skype, switch­ing costs are vir­tu­ally nonex­is­tent, par­tic­u­larly when you use a multiple-chat client like Tril­lian, which sup­ports AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo Mes­sen­ger, and IRC.

My pro­file on LinkedIn is here.

*Note: time and again peo­ple have con­nected with each other pro­fes­sion­ally and socially and have formed rela­tion­ships with each other long before meet­ing in per­son (telegram, tele­phone, inter­net …) but it’s not always easy to iden­tify prospec­tive part­ners. On the other hand, LinkedIn has per­haps the most exten­sive and inter­na­tional net­work of pro­fes­sion­als and exec­u­tives, yet it has not been easy to com­mu­ni­cate with them. Let’s hope for improved LinkedIn com­mu­nity areas (ie. “tele­coms pro­fes­sion­als”, etc.) and LinkedIn Mobile (or LinkedIn Wire­less), which shouldn’t be too far off as GoogleNet gets built in San Fran­cisco, where 342,000 peo­ple main­tain LinkedIn profiles.

Update: This fas­ci­nat­ing post at Bub­ble Gen­er­a­tion explains how com­bi­na­to­r­ial gains are supe­rior to expo­nen­tial gains:

More sim­ply, Web 2.0 is about the shift from net­work search economies,
which real­ize mild expo­nen­tial gains — your util­ity is bounded by the
num­ber of things (peo­ple, etc) you can find on the net­work -
to net­work coör­di­na­tion economies, which real­ize com­bi­na­to­r­ial gains:
your util­ity is bounded by the num­ber of things (trans­ac­tions, etc) you
can do on the network.

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