LinkedIn is really good

After I accepted a colleague’s invitation to join his network today, LinkedIn gave me a list of ten other people I might know. Historically, those lists have been utterly useless for me — “other people who have worked at Self Employed”, etc.

Today, amazingly, 10 out of 10 were people I knew personally. Quite a few of them were non-obvious - people I’d met at conferences, or had specific business communications with. Most of them were people I knew well enough to add to my network.

Maybe it was a lucky batch, but it sure seems like LinkedIn’s algorithm found the people in my connections’ networks that I was most likely to know. If I had to guess, I would hazard they are extracting some kind of parameters from the kind of people already in my network and applying them to the set of people (in my network’s 1st-degree network + matching my employers). The approach is obvious, the execution is probably hard to nail, and the effect is exactly what it should be: magic.

It’s a good reminder that, despite all the exciting things Facebook is doing these days, LinkedIn is a very effective “social graph” for my business network. If they innovate fast enough, there’s a lot more they could do with it — and I look forward to it.

If you’re not already in my network, btw, the link is in the column to the right.