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.