Dinosaurs demise Part IV: epitaph

We talked about dying dinosaurs and mummies in the previous chapter.

Where do you find dinosaurs remnants and mummies today?

You usually find them in museum.

I invite you to visit the mega-networker museum where you will find these dinosaurs or mummies.

We’re talking about web stuff, so it’s an online museum.

Let’s surf at http://linkedin.pbwiki.com/500. This is a brother museum from the one I wrote about in part I.

Here comes the curator: Marc Freedman already expelled from LinkedIn top50.

Have a look at the 1^st display: http://linkedin.pbwiki.com/MyLink10000

Here, Marc Freedman curator, reintegrated the LinkedIn place he lost in this already dusty museum.

If this display was complete (this is a half empty museum) you should see Marjan Bolmeijer. Marjan is an already discouraged mega-networker, refusing to play the networking game, that is to transmit requests. She is an already inactive/mummified mega-networker.

This is the common fate of mega-networker, as they don’t see any interest of being a mega-networker anymore, they let their network die and with themselves some of their direct connections.

Let’s now have a look at the 2^nd display: http://linkedin.pbwiki.com/MyLink5000

Only one pathetic person trying to still have the sacred online networking fire: myself.

Here is the epitaph: “Tell the king the ornately designed temple has collapsed. Phoebus no longer has a home, nor a mantic laurel, nor a talking spring. The babbling water has run dry.”

This epitaph was first uttered in year 362 AD by Delphi Oracle concerning its own demise. This was the end of classical greek culture, a foundation of the modern western world.

Start the story again...

Dinosaurs demise Part III: Konstantin, kill’em all!

Konstantin, please, find here my 2 cents advices to complete LinkedIn evolution towards the ultimate online business networking tool. Now you should specifically implement steps 3 and 4 detailed below.

3^rd step : enforce the no email policy (summer 2008).

goal is to earn money.

Having it’s email visible is kind of having a free “personal plus” account. You can be contacted by everyone but freely.

Make people pay for visibility!

4^th step: take off the “sort by number” search option (december 2008).

Goal is to just kill the mega-networkers and definitely get rid of those pests.

if you take off the “sort by number” search option, mega-networkers are now undistinguishable from any regular user. They can’t compare their connection numbers between each other and thus they lose one of their motivation that set thenm apart from the regular user.

It will probably be like the unthinkable catastrophe that destroyed dinosaurs millions years ago. Mega-networkers will slowly wither and return to ashes or at least be mummified.

Now that LinkedIn is enforcing its rules and that there is no user annoyance problem let’s see in part IV the destiny of the mummified mega-networkers.

Dinosaurs demise Part II: mega-networker twilight

Once LinkedIn has been established as a serious and widely adopted online business tool, there came the problem of becoming profitable and fix complaints by spammed users. Here are 2 steps that have been implemented addressing these concerns.

1^st step: cutting visibility from 4 to 3 levels (summer 2005).

Goal was to improve profitability by being able to sell new features such as the openlink.

Openlink makes the problem of being separated irrelevant: you’re accessible by almost anyone. But if you have 4 levels of visibility, provided that you havea few dizains of connections, you are also accessible by everyone.

2^nd step: limit mega-networkers activity (winter 2006).

Goal was, and still is, to avoid some annoying side effects due to mega-networkers activity.

These mega-networking side effects are listed below:

• high: sometimes do some borderline spamming to collect new connections and thus being an annoyance to other regular users.
• high: spoil the network by removing all signification to the chain of trust between users.
• low: non paying privilege access due to number of connections

Concretely limiting mega-networking activity is done by:

• number of connections are not displayed above 500.
• users are not allowed to send more than 3000 invitations.

Having more than 5000 connections become almost impossible with the 3000 invitations cap.

There are still other steps to be taken to get people stop cheating and to get rid of the mega-networkers in order to be a spam free online business networking tool.

I will expose these other steps in part III.

Dinosaurs demise on Linkedin Part I: how LinkedIn ruled them all

Once upon a time, internet ages ago, in 1995, in the deep and wet marshes of the internet, a website: classmates.com was created. classmates.com was the first of a fairly high number of “online social network website” now a sizeable part of the online buzz.

Let’s look more closely at one of these website: LinkedIn. LinkedIn is arguably the first, in terms of users, in the online BUSINESS networking websites. Why is LinkedIn the first?

Let’s imagine you would want to launch an online BUSINESS networking tool. What would you do?

1^st step: build a website with nice features.

It’s relatively easy but in terms of features what is the difference between a stalled tool (CIWI) and a successful one (OpenBC)? CIWI and OpenBC have exactly the same interface but one is an established success (OpenBC), the other (CIWI) is still in its infancy.

Having nice features is not enough. We need a 2^nd step.

2^nd step: get people registering AND using it.

You need to have lot of people participating to a network to make it attractive.

Mega-networkers animate a network because they are very active.

You need to motivate mega-networkers.

Mega-networkers can be motivated by:

1. ability to invite lot of people to connect them.
2. ability to receive, forward or initiate virtual or real encounters for discovering new opportunities.
3. looking at what’s going on on the web.
4. seeing their number of connections increasing.
5. seeing that they have more connections than other mega-networkers (Yeah! I know it’s bad).

OK. So mega-networkers are, sometimes, motivated by seeing that they have more connections than others. Let’s have a search tool that has the ability to sort results by number of connections.

That’s what LinkedIn did in the early days…

LinkedIn early days

Let’s visit an online LinkedIn museum

When you go back to LinkedIn 2003 early days (http://www.toplinked.com/2006/02/toplinked_septe.html), you observe that people like Reid Hoffmann and Konstantin Guericke were in the top 3 in numbers of connections.

Reid and Konstantin were the top mega-networkers of this period.

For people not aware: Reid and Konstantin still work at LinkedIn today.

Mega-networkers had a significant importance to the LinkedIn success, and were once part of its strategy for growth.

But the wheel of life turns for everyone and that brings us to part II of this article series.

DINOSAURS DEMISE ON LINKEDIN: DON’T READ THIS!

This is an introduction to a serie of 4 articles about LinkedIn past, present and future complex relations with “mega-networkers”.

Glossary: a widely accepted definition is that Linkedin mega-networkers have, nowadays, thousand(s) of 1st level connections.

Audience for these articles is:
• LinkedIn administrators
• Mega-networkers, less than 0.1% of LinkedIn audience (but they are more active and visible than average LinkedIn users)
• Web historians and web ethnographs

If you’re not matching one of these 3 categories, DON’T READ THESE ARTICLES. You will lose your time and wonder how people can be so weird.

The plan is the following:

Part I: how LinkedIn ruled them all
LinkedIn early relations with mega-networking

Part II: mega-networker twilight
LinkedIn recent and current relations with mega-networking

Part III: Konstantin, kill’em all!
My 2 cents advice to LinkedIn administrators for the near future of LinkedIn.

Part IV: epitaph
“Tell the king the ornately designed temple has collapsed. Phoebus no longer has a home, nor a mantic laurel, nor a talking spring. The babbling water has run dry.”


Articles will also be posted in http://www.gle.ch and http://eric-mariacher.blogspot.com/

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van eyck

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linkedin

freemind and treemap

Has anyone done some roundtrip transformation from freemind to treemap to freemind?

That would be way cool.