Monday morning blurb

LinkedIn

I catch a lot of flack for my 500+ LinkedIn contacts. How many do I really know? I have no idea.
Some of the contact requests I receive I ignore. I have a litmus test which determines whether or not I want a contact in my network.

- I like recruiters. Jaws drop when I say this, but recruiters know where the jobs are and which companies are hiring. I contact recruiters frequently when helping friends find work.

- Current co-workers. It makes sense.

- Colleagues in similar markets. I do not get enough of these, so if you are in the wireless space (hardware or network), machine communications, SEO (personal favorite) or social networking, please drop me an invite.

- Interesting people. Politicians, VC's, NPO's, etc. Anyone besides the usual corporate types.

I usually check my LinkedIn filter about once a week and run a mass acceptance for several contact requests at one time.

Note: I still cannot sent out email invites or answer questions posed in LinkedIn Answers. I received a generic response from LinkedIn "while they look into the matter".
Hint: Reid, fix customer service. Many are disenchanted with this one non-feature of LinkedIn.

TEN
I joined TEN this past week. TEN is a fairly basic, start up business network with a strong emphasis on Latin American countries (with a healthy dose of EU thrown in). My company does a significant amount of business in Latin America and I thought this would be a good place to do some guerrilla marketing.
Like I said, TEN is basic and will most assuredly improve over time. There are more public groups than LinkedIn from what I can tell. I also like the interface better than Ecademy.

Social Networks
2007 will be the year we see more social networks than ever before. That is the word from.. me. It is nice to cite third-party resources, but the Internet has rapidly become the home of the Instant Expert. Seth Godin has a great ebook on the subject which is free (not really, it is a plug for his latest SU Squidoo).

Nevertheless, social networks are hot this year. Don't plan on starting another Facebook or MySpace. The trend will be on ever shrinking yet potentially profitable niche markets. I think this is the undoing of several social networks in that they attract the anti-social. Rude people, hermits, privacy freaks, anarchists, etc. are tough markets to build the next MySpace with. They simply don't want to interact or build friends lists.

Which brings me next to...

Politics

I don't care who is running for office or if this is an election year. Politics are boring. And polarizing. So many social networks are overrun with politics because people are passionate about politics. And that polarization runs subscribers off as the tone of the network changes for the worse.

There is a problem with politics (besides the polarization); no money. I would stack dollars to donuts that political topics on social networks have low advertising click thru returns versus other topics. So why the obsession with turning every social network into a political soapbox?
Who knows? I stay out of that fray altogether.

This is my opinion. And on today's Internet, that makes me an expert. :)

Have a great week.