I was sitting in my office, and my new office mate had a few people in her office trying to troubleshoot the newest feature they had added to their program. They needed to call someone in, but didn’t have his phone number, so they called the directory. We were all shocked at what came next.
Hi, this is Bill Gates.
A true conversation from this evening:
Vince: “Dude, where you been?”
Me: “What do you mean?”
Vince: “You’ve been noticeably absent from the blogosphere.”
Me: “… I have a blog?”
Vince: “Um… dude?”
Me: “Who are you?”
Have you ever ordered something from Amazon? How does it usually play out… Step 1: Place the order. Step 2: Get a confirmation email immediately. Step 3: Order ships. Step 4: Credit card charged. Step 5: Shipping confirmation.
If you think about any online transaction site, it usually functions this way, doesn’t it? So why was my Flickr experience so different?
When you think about the process of networking, there seem to be two key phases: Making the connections, and keeping in touch with them. Sites that aim to support social networking come up with all sorts of ideas to innovate on the latter (profiles, groups, status, random music in the middle of the webpage -shudder-), but the former seems pretty straight forward. If person A wants to connect with person B, let person B know, and he/she can accept or decline.
Even Facebook, where there is (or, was) a concept of networks, adding a friend was still easy. Find them. Add them. Wait for a reply.
LinkedIn, on the other hand, is slightly different. There are two ways to add a friend. If you don’t share a common background, adding your friend is as simple as sending the invite… if you know his/her current email address. Now, I only know the email addresses for about 3% of the people I knew in college. That’s not to say I wouldn’t want to network with them, especially on a professionally-oriented site like LinkedIn.
