What is LinkedIn needed for? Absolutely nothing. And the same goes for MySpace.
Jon Udell asks whether private social networks such as LinkedIn are needed, or whether they can be completely refactored across the public internet. I say the latter. In social networking as in almost everything else, there’s no long-term need for an internet walled garden.
LinkedIn could be replaced by a system with the following architecture:
- Individuals self-publish their own resumes. They can use a precise template that’s centrally available – like a WordPress theme, but simpler – or they can use the format of their choice with markup tags to highlight their job experience descriptions, educational attainments, and so on.
- Contacts, recommendations, etc. go through a central database maintained by a central profit-making company – let’s call it Linkerati. Any display of same on your personal resume is done by a call to Linkerati’s servers.
- Linkerati also defines standards, such as markup tags, or the way to tell the boundaries of a multi-page resume web “site.”
- Linkerati enforces whatever policies it thinks it can get away with – if any — with in terms of requiring members to display discreet ads.
- On the forms you fill in to request contacts, get recommendations, etc., Linkerati runs ads.
- Linkerati aspires to offer the best search across its users. (This could work better than it does for Technorati, because the search will be quite fielded.) Of course, it runs ads here too.
I don’t see anything in the above that couldn’t be pulled off by a classic, lightly-funded Web 2.0 startup.
Exactly the same argument can be applied to MySpace. The differences would only be in such details as:
- More media-rich and complex page templates.
- (Likely) A variety of companies offering to host such pages, each with its own consumer marketing agenda.
- Security issues for the central database, because of dangers such as sexual predation.
But what, you ask, about confidentiality? For example, FaceBook pages are only visible to approved other users or classes of users. Well, access control is just another technical feature — provided for in the page template, and driven by the controls on the Linkerati central user directory.
As for LinkedIn itself – well, I haven’t used it much for a year and a half. But I visit occasionally, and both its strengths and drawbacks seem similar to those I wrote about back in the day.
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[…] Responding to a question by Jon Udell a few hours ago, I argued that private social networking “walled gardens” aren’t needed. The whole thing can be done publicly as well, assuming there’s a central database to help with things like access control, as in the hypothetical service I named “Linkerati.” […]
[…] A proposal to refactor social networks […]