However, if you search the blogs for “InMail”, you can also see how we are looking to evolve LinkedIn in the next few weeks to make it a bit more direct and enhance the trust factor. Social designs are tricky, but we’ve been evolving LinkedIn for over two years, so hopefully we will get there soon for most of the people most of the time.

One of the things I’ve learned that LinkedIn truly works. That’s the good news. The bad news is you have to “work” LinkedIn. If you never put your LinkedIn network to a real test of using it to find somebody you want to meet for a specific career or business purpose, you will never see the full value.

It is a challenge for us that people just accept invitations and then hope for some magic to happen. Sometimes, it does happen, but magic on LinkedIn sure does seem to respond to some “real” searches and requesting introductions . . .

-Konstantin
LinkedIn co-founder
https://www.linkedin.com/p/kguericke

great piece. agreed that aggregated (preferably also structured) info + some form of trust metric moves the usefulness of the web forward dramatically.

however, to that point i’m not sure i get why you think LinkedIn isn’t helpful in that regard? guessing your reaction stems from you being a web personality, and LinkedIn may be a little less helpful when there’s an asymmetrical effect going on, especially if someone like you gets asked to *give* a lot more than you *get*. for the majority of folks who aren’t celebrities or media personalities, i believe the effect is a lot more balanced, and thus a lot more useful. when i left PayPal and joined Simply Hired, i started using LinkedIn a lot more to connect with folks and the benefits were quite dramatic.

this was one of the reasons we chose to do the SimplyHired-LinkedIn partnership, and do exactly what you have suggested above — that is, create a mashup from the two sites combining social networking data from LinkedIn with structured, aggregated data (in our case it was job listing & company data) from SimplyHired.

i do take your point that the use of a more flexible, lightweight network of relationship data could be useful, altho i’m not sure i want to use that type of weak trust or relationship link to help me in my job search — quite the opposite in fact. i’d probably prefer to use only the top 1/3 of my LinkedIn network (or any other social network) to find a job, since i’d want those people to give me a strong referral based on their knowledge of my capabilities.

perhaps for other less critical online tasks the more lightweight social network you mention could be useful — say, for shopping, for travel, or for web content. but i would posit the more significant the transaction value (in either money, time, or emotion), the *stronger*, more trustworthy the relationship should be that i engage to assist with the task at hand.

one final comment around vertical search: many people appear to be jumping to the conclusion that the business models of vertical search startups are based on just simple aggregation and/or the initial search engine featureset that is launched. this is a serious miscalculation, and quite short-sighted IMHO. “vertical search” (aka aggregating & integrating structured data) is just phase 1 of the business, and phases 2, 3, & 4 are about using structured data to build APPLICATIONS, CONTENT, and COMMUNITY that drive user adoption & value. remember that Google took about 2-3 years after they built a great search engine to come up with AdWords, AdSense, and Gmail properties they are now using to monetize. Rome was not built in a day folks…

for more thoughts on layering apps & content on top of vertical search, checkout my Top 10 Rules for Vertical Revolutionaries presentation from the recent Vertical Leap conference we co-hosted with SDForum and Yahoo.

in any case, i’d strongly agree with your assertion that integrating social networking data makes for more valuable search engines and services. i’d even go a step further, and suggest that the applications and content built on top of these data services is where the real value gets delivered.

- Dave McClure
SimplyHired.com
less crap. more jobs.

mailtotheceo@jobster.com