LinkedIn and Plaxo: Adapt or Die
Dan Farber’s scoop about LinkedIn’s plans to adapt to the new world that Facebook is making is almost anticlimatic:
[from � LinkedIn to open up to developers | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com by Dan Farber]
I talked to LinkedIn founder and Chairman Reid Hoffman on Friday at the Supernova 2007 conference about Facebook’s rapid growth and potential incursion into his territory. He told me that over next 9 months LinkedIn would deliver APIs for developers, ostensibly to make it more of platform like Facebook, and create a way for users who spend more time socially in Facebook to get LlinkedIn notifications.
One half of that message is just sensible: if you have a huge social network, why not allow others to build on top of it? The second half almost suggests conceding leadership to Facebook, as if Facebook is the really social social network, while Linkedin is some more functional thing that just so happens to work based on social relationships. Which is really what I have always thought was wrong with LinkedIn: it’s a bunch of business processes that are partially automated that rely on a large database of people’s relationships. It is, however, not the sort of place where you make or foster relationships. So, in a way, Reid is conceding nothing, since what Facebook is doing is intensely social, not just leveraging a big dataset of contacts.
In a similar fashion, Plaxo’s Ben Golub and I spoke the other day, and the ‘contact unmanagement’ company has released a beta of Plaxo 3.0: a real category shift, in many ways. Along with a long roster of synchronization options (like Google Calendar, Mac OS X Address Book and Calendar, Outlook, and especially, LinkedIn, which represents a whole new angle: syncing social networks (to be expanded in another post)), Golub and company have added a ‘Pulse’ feature that plants the product over in the camp of flow apps, like Twitter, Jaiku, and Facebook.
Pulse pulls new media traffic from your Plaxo contacts: photos from Flickr, blog updates, address modifications, and so on. I have already requested some kind of desktop tool (like Twitterific) for Pulse.
I find the Plaxo sync stuff sort of awkward, but that’s because I have my calendars and contacts spread out in a very unique way. I use Google Calendar as my actual calendar, and only sync to the Mac OS X iCal so I can sync to my phone. And I have addresses all over, primarily because I can’t sync between my Mac Address app and Google. If Plaxo fixes that I would be happy, but the Google address sync is still planned for the future.
I see Plaxo breaking into two twinned parts: synchronization of various sorts of coordinative data caught up in calendars, address books and to-do lists (yawn… useful, but so twentieth century), and a new (less boring) collection of services that are traffic-and-flow based.
Pulse is another run at the Nerdvana meme I have been pursuing for a long, long time. The basic notion of Nerdvana is that we want to have updates of all sorts from our contacts collated into a buddylist representation, which is where Golub tells be Plaxo is headed. I could see Brian Solis’ online presence, most recent status message, last five blog posts, and recent Flickr pictures, but linked to the buddylist icon for Brian.
[I can’t tell you how many IM companies I have have suggested this too, over the years, by the way. But again, we have to look to the upstarts to do the breakthroughs, I guess.]
If Plaxo heads this way, my recommendation will be to break Pulse out as a separate application, one that relies on data managed within the Plaxo platform, but sylistically and operationally separate. It has nothing to do with sync of data, and everything to do with media traffic flowing through personal relationships.
Both Plaxo and LinkedIn seem to be making serious business model adjustments, based on the new world.
