Yet Another Social Network? Oreilly Connection
August 2nd, 2005I think LinkedIn is a really cool tool. I like being able to view my network and how people connect. But, there are quite a few things that bug me and the launch of O’Reilly Connection seems to keep many of these same irritants:
- Its centralized
- It seems schmoozy – I always feel weird inviting people to LinkedIn, especially people without an interest in such technologies
- It doesn’t support varying degrees of trust and relationships (although endorsements help)
- Its not mobile – Cell phones are the basic unit of social networking and communication. I’m rarely in social situation with my computer. There must be some way to take advantage of the cell phone.
- It doesn’t have an API
- It doesn’t interoperate with all the other social networking tools
OC is positing itself as a place to connect to find developers. You can see this in their profile builder which is actually quite nice. Finding developers is Hard (capital H), especially with Google/Microsoft/Amazon/etc stealing anyone who is any good lately. I also realize that this is a niche, but I don’t think theres a big enough difference between it and LinkedIn for it to differentiate itself. I could be wrong though, as its beta.
I’m thinking about some possible solutions to my gripes. Hopefully I’ll post them soon, in the mean time, do others have ideas?
Also if you want to connect via Linked/OC just look me up as I’m now on both.
August 22nd, 2005 at 12:51 pm
I’ve found O’Reilly people very receptive to ideas. It looks like Connection is maintained by Tony Stubblebine and Nancy Abila. The thing I like about Connection already is the fact that I can go get the FOAF data and do something like these graphviz graphs, try doing that with LinkedIn or Friendster. I’d like to see O’Reilly merge Connection with the DOAP feeds from CodeZoo. Actually I’d like to see someone figure out how to crawl the ASF svn repository and spit out DOAP files.
Blah, hey thanks for XFire.
August 22nd, 2005 at 1:13 pm
[...] Tim O’Brien left a comment in my Blog on my post about O’Reilly Connection: The thing I like about Connection already is the fact that I can go get the FOAF data and do something like these graphviz graphs, try doing that with LinkedIn or Friendster… [...]
August 24th, 2005 at 3:46 pm
Hey,
Thanks for the feedback on OC.
You’re the first person to mention how cool it would be to work with cell phones. That’s an awesome idea.
As for varying degrees of trust, I agree and am hoping to have a new level up in a few weeks. One of the cool features that we already have, and are constantly improving, is aggregation of someone’s tech activity. Right now we’ve got personal blogs, O’Reilly articles and weblogs, comments on O’Reilly articles and weblogs, and CodeZoo user tips. An important trust measurement is “so-and-so says amazingly important things but doesn’t have any idea who I am.”
We want users to be able to create and share watch lists of their favorite authors/programmers.
Our vision for making this a successful social network is to have the social network fade into the background as a feature that merely enables other more useful activity.