Archive of thenextweb.com

Your LinkedIn network is getting less valuable with the day

Written on 3rd September 2008 11 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Yesterday a business student interviewed me for his master thesis about the perceived trustworthiness within social networking sites. He wanted to know how I shaped my judgments about people on LinkedIn. His last question blew me away, although is was very simple. “How will LinkedIn be evolved in five years?”. I had never really thought about this. After a few minutes, I realized my LinkedIn network will be quite useless then. When we were discussing this devaluation, we both acknowledged it had two main reasons. We’re too friendly, and a lot of people go separate ways.

We’re too friendly

LinkedIn tries very hard to convince us not to accept people we hardly know with their explanatory “Which invitations should you accept?” link. According to this page, we have to consider replying or deciding later when we don’t know the sender well. Fair enough, but you’re not gonna reject that guy with who you had a nice chat during a conference? Most of us are too friendly. We don’t want to offend the chap who invites you to connect. What do we have to lose anyway?

Separate ways

Of all these people we accept, quite a few make sudden career moves to a totally different industry or stop working at all. Some might even die. These occurrences make some of our connections useless. After a while, say five years, a whole lot of connections are not relevant anymore. They can’t help us with questions, because there out of the game for quite some time, or they have left everything business-related behind.

The network will lose its value

So in five years, your first grade network will be as cluttered as your third grade network is now. You’ve forgotten who half of the people are, and from some, you’ll never hear again. Moreover, have you ever thought about how many contacts you’ll have by then. A few thousand maybe? To sum it up: your network will become quite useless. LinkedIn will evolve in something else, a phone book on steroids.

LinkedIn as the ultimate phone book

I assume you’ll keep your profile up to date, so will other people who take LinkedIn seriously. That will make LinkedIn a rather great phone book. You can always look up ANYONE, as the chance is really big this person will have registered on LinkedIn by then. The value of the resume stays in touch. The ways of contacting people as well. There’s just thing that will be pretty useless, the graph showing you’re connected to this person trough 132321 other people.

devaluation, linkedin, professional network, value

11 Comments »

iHipo and rapping Singaporeans about to conquer Europe

Written on 29th February 2008 0 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Young professionals, ambitious students and recruiters who are disappointed in the effectiveness of LinkedIn or Facebook, could look for better times at iHipo.com: ‘the High Potential network dedicated to empowering international careers’. It’s the place for young people with international ambitions to connect with human resource managers who roam the social networks of the world to find talented youngsters.

Companies are looking for the best people, regardless of their nationality

The founders, three recent graduates from Germany, the Netherlands and Singapore, believe to follow a globalization trend on the world-wide job market. Arnout Wagenaar: “Companies are looking for the best people, regardless of their nationality. Also, people have a growing need to work internationally.”

On iHipo, there are two kinds of profiles: as a business you can post jobs and search for new talent. As a professional, you can search for jobs and friends in your industry. There’s also the Knowledge Base with over 2,000 international HR contacts and interview preparation material. Further features include a Google maps mashup to geographically highlight the iHipo community, a Facebook application and a number of new networking tools.

I guess it must be a struggle to be successful in this job specific area of the web. It’s a niche with hundreds of players, and they’re are all trying to lure young talents into their professional network. Yet iHipo seems to do a pretty good job. The Singaporean company launched in July 2007 and managed to attract close to 1,000 registered users and 160 job offers by international employers in the first week. They were mainly successful in the US and South-East Asia and now plan to expand to Europe.

Well, this week iHipo has received some more capital for their European conquest, since they’ve closed a seed round of funding by Thymos Capital and the Media Development Authority of Singapore (MDA). And with the latter backing them up, they can face everybody. The MDA are those tough Senior Management rappers you might know from the YouTube video that was viewed more than 200,000 times: