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.

After having used social networking sites for almost two years, it has struck me how different the types of connections that you encounter in social networking are. I think the following 6 desciptions cover the main types of contacts that I have.

Proactive
Usually they invite you before you get a chance to invite them! Enthusiastic about social networking and sometimes even open networking. However, you can be quite sure that you get an invite if you know one of these people. Some proactive users may also

Collectors
These users do everything to get as many friends, buddies connections – the more the better. Collectors may be just as proactive as the proactive user but will typically lose interest in connections once the connection has been established. These are very useful as facilitators of connections, although many of the connections they can deliver may not be of a high quality standard.

Responsive
Users who accept your invitations but rely on others to invite them rather being proactive in setting up a network.

Reluctant
People who only accept an invitation after receiving one or more reminders – either through the networking tool or after being prompted by people in real life.

Unresponsive
People who you find on social networks but who never responds to invitations even when they are sent reminders. They have probably signed up at some point by mistake or they are no longer interested.

Non-existent
People who are not on any social networks.

You may say that all this is good but what is the value of this information. Soon I will explore whether we can measure the overall quality of our network by assigning values to these 6 categories.

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.

Danah Boyd has written a very interesting essay on Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace. Basically Danah argues that Facebook are for the more affluent middle/upper class college kids where MySpace seems to attract youths from less privileged backgrounds. I wonder if there is a similar divide in any European countries?

Today, BBC’s technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones, has an interesting piece on how busy networkers pay someone else up to £1,000 to provide interesting content to their profile. Cellan-Jones seems to question whether this defies the whole purpose of the direct access to people via Facebook.
Although I do get the point, I don’t think this is very different to the
real world were many people in high profile jobs have a PA to answer phone calls, emails etc.

I believe that a PA, also in the virtual world, may be able to provide a better answer, quicker, because they usually do not have to focus on a number of other tasks. So although I can understand Cellan-Jones’s desire for authenticity though I am not sure that this will always serve us best. Facebook maybe a tool for Joe Bloggs to get a little closer to the famous people while famous people will also have a chance to befriend people like Joe Bloggs with or without the help of a PA.