Haydn Shaughnessy
I'm a big believer in the power of semantic technologies to summarize, conceptualize or classify personal information. For example, I think in future we will read less of a book, website or document and instead read semantically generated summaries of everything we should read, books for example that our contacts have read. I wrote briefly recently on how that summary function could work with search. LinkedIn is trying to bring a similar kind of reason, order and insight to your LinkedIn connections, with its mapping tool InMaps.
So I just used, and completed labeling, LinkedIn's new mapping tool. The tool groups together your contacts. It spatially separates them into logical groupings. LinkedIn says the visualization can help you see where you lack connections - for example in a job that was important in your career but where you just didn't come away with enough contacts- you can see that at a glance. And one of its outputs is to highlight people who seem to be instrumental in how you have built your network.
I still find LinkedIn a little distant from my professional needs as a freelancer and my first reaction is I don't think that InMaps is going to help me much. It's a puzzle to me - suggesting that there are influencers in my professional life that in reality have no bearing on what I do. The people it claims have influenced me, in fact have not. Maybe you will have more luck with that feature.
But the more I stare at it, the more I realize there is a value here. What it is telling me very clearly is that I really don't use my network. I don't communicate with most of the people in it. There are whole chunks of my network I don't eve think about. And typically I have labelled it by organization, largely by the company where I met the people grouped together.
I think the real value here is a different order of semantics than "company". If LinkedIn were telling me who I communicate with, if there was a LinkedIn function to process a work contract, perhaps from Echosign, if my profile could be better adapted to my freelance status, if there were channels that my network could share RFPs or freelance opportunities with me and me with them?. Providing me with an instant visual summary of that kind of activity would seriously enhance my insights into my business.
InMaps isn't what I need right now but as the workforce becomes externalized and free I think LinkedIn has a great opportunity to become my essential social, business network, providing me with new levels of understanding of how I function. First though please sort out the privacy issues LinkedIn! The reason I haven't duplicated my network map here is it reveals all of my contacts to the public gaze.
Follow me on Twitter @haydn1701
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