Guy Kawasaki recently had a post on his blog about Spokeo which I thought, I had better check out. After getting over the irritation of not being able to use my preferred email address, I found it fascinating to get blogs, flickr streams and other more or less interesting news about people who happened to be in my hotmail address book – if nothing else this was a prime example of why we should always consider to weed our contacts lists from time to time

However, after my initial enthusiasm subsided I got irritated over several small things in the tool.
1) My LinkedIn contacts do not all seem to update – some of them stay as numbers and although all profiles can be displayed by clicking on the number why can’t Spokeo at least retrive the name…

2) Organising information by person or alphabetically rather than by platform.
I mainly use LinkedIn and Facebook and have just over 100 in the former and between 20 and 30 Facebook friends. Still I would much rather be able to see information on a contact across several platforms rather than looking at all platforms before moving on to the next.

Otherwise an interesting tool, but personally I still prefer to visit people profile pages on LinkedIn and Facebook, especially if they include links to their Flickr stream, del.icio.us bookmarks and YouTube channel here.

Two thirds of the way into the campaign of the 2007 general election I have decided to check out if any party leaders have decided to set up a profile on LinkedIn, MySpace or Facebook.

Villy Søvndal decided to set up a Facebook profile on 4 November and has already managed to get 290 Facebook friends within 3 days. Surprisingly this is only a few less than Margrethe Vesterager with 327 friends who has been on Facebook for slightly longer. Both are still a long way behind  the main contesters Helle Thorning-Schmidt (2505 friends) and Anders Fogh Rasmussen (2607 friends). It would be interesting to see if the number of Facebook friends in any way will reflect the number share of seats the parties will get in the new parliament.

This week saw the launch of Google’s Open Social – a new open standard for social networks which be used on a variety of platforms from LinkedIn over Orkut to MySpace. Most of the blogs I read regularly are enthusiastic about this development:
O’Reilly Radar
Marc Andreesen
Jeff Jarvis
The Guardian
Karl Long

Now the question is of course whether Facebook has already got a size where they can stick to their own platform and take on the competition or whether platforms using the new Open Social standard will win in the long run.

Some other useful links:
http://blog.linkedin.com/
http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/

The Danish prime minister called a general election yesterday and it made me wonder how many Danish party leaders are actually using social networking tools like LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace.

A quick search gave the following results:

Only the two main candidates use two of the tools, Facebook and MySpace. Neither Anders Fogh Rasmussen nor Helle Thorning-Schmidt are using the more serious tool, LinkedIn. From the above it looks like Danish politicians still do their canvassing without social networking tools.

Recently, US democratic senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama consulted LinkedIn users about small businesses and entrepreneurs and connected with almost 1500 LinkedIn users who responded to the question, but it looks like this type of campaign has not yet come to Denmark.

For a while I have been considering whether Instant Messaging could fill a communications gap I experience between email and telephone in the workplace.

I am too old to have grown up with Instant Messaging and have therefore, by habit, often relied on email. I decided to post a question on the LinkedIn Answers section to see if anyone else had some thoughts on this subject.

I had a strong sense that IM would be the right tool in terms of being a mixture of email while bringing the instant response that we are used to from telephone conversation. Also I hoped that the more transient nature of IM would make people more inclined to respond quickly.

Although I frequently manage to hit send before I meant to (and often have finished drafts that I had meant to send), email seems to make people think twice before they send something, and frequently not respond at all or respond after a while.

I have created the following list of pros and cons.

Pros:

• Ability to see if colleagues are online and thus not writing emails or phoning in vain
• Quicker when you need to have a quick consultation with someone
• Good for small talk or phatic communication (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phatic).
• Personally, I think this can be very important for building team spirit and cohesion.
• A little more informal than email which may generate more ideas.

Cons:

• Circumvents antivirus systems
• Could be a time waster – but as one person points out time wasters will waste time whatever tool you give them
• Not possible to document

See the full list of answers here:
http://www.linkedin.com/answers/business-operations/project-management/OPS_PRJ/116661-4119495

The latest entry on the LinkedIn blog on communicating effectively features something I haven’t seem before. In addition to the blog post, Chris Richman, also explains the content of the blog post in a YouTube video clip. Although one could argue this is presenting the information twice, I don’t feel that this is a tautology. This dual layer approach works very well and it is nice to see the content presented in a new way, possilby this should be called YouBlog.

The title of the blog post is “Communicating more effectively through LinkedIn” and this is exactly what the YouTube clip achieves. Well done and keep up the good work at LinkedIn.