Saturday, November 04, 2006

Making Introductions


patternHunter observes...

One of the challenges with "social networking" sites is that most are more correctly "social linking" sites.

...they are all like bad parties where everyone is gathered in small circles with their backs to anyone new. One of the benefits of a good host/hostess (other than attracting an interesting crowd) is his/her ability to introduce individuals to other individuals who are likely to share some kind of interest. To my knowledge, no social networking site is particularly good at making introductions and most do not even try.

Right on. We train networkweavers to make useful & actionable introductions.

2 comments:

SteveHabibRose said...

YouShouldMeet at http://www.youshouldmeet.com/ attempts to serve this function.

Actually, a number of systems have built in capabilities to enable introductions -- Ecademy and Biznik being among them. But, the biggie, LinkedIn, doesn't, as far as I know.

Anonymous said...

The difficulty lies in spam-like introductions that have no meaning at all. If each member of a social networking community was able to classify him/herself according to a precise combination of taxonomy and folksonomy (tags, keywords, and phrases) - this ability to introduce oneself based on searching and finding relevant persons in a meaningful way could be satisfied. It might be said that social networking sites biggest problem lies in the inability of it's members (due to lack of functionality in the social network platform) to precisely classify and tag themselves and therefore be found by other members for meaningful and relevant networking introductions.