Good to see new design of your blog!

Nice post! And take a look at the comments. A lot of feature requests! After reading I came up with this
http://bloodcarter.wordpress.com/2008/05/31/long-tail-feature-requests/

Just some thoughts about “Feature vendors” as I called them)))))

Take care,
Vlad

I agree with Chris, I don’t think alphabetically. Sometimes, I have a question, and I don’t immediately know which of my contacts might be best to help me with it. If I could group them, then I could easily go to the group of people that might be able to help me, and pick some. I don’t have a HUGE amount of connections, but enough that sometimes I forget about people who I might have wanted to contact about something.

Being able to add the meta-data to the connections would also help the situation. As others have mentioned, being able to add that data to connections so that my memory is jogged when I look at their info would be quite helpful.

On another note, I thought that LinkedIn kinda used to let me do this. I used to have different choices for how I know this person, some of which I created. Now, I only have the choices of my positions/companies, and my groups. Am I missing something?

For improvements, I think someone earlier mentioned a disdain for headhunter phone calls. Agree. I have started demanding that they invite me if they call me, and my last call came from a guy (no names need be mentioned) who called himself an “open networker”. When I accepted his invite, I discovered that he had made his contacts private. Wow, get a dictionary and look up the word “open”.

I realize that if I indicate on my profile that I’m willing to discuss job opportunities, then it is really my own fault. Still, I think there’s a violation of my trust since I don’t post my work phone number nor do I indicate that it’s OK to call me at work. Having a “trust ranking” system for people similar to seller ratings on eBay would be something useful, but I imagine it would be very easy to game the system for political or whatever reasons (but hey, this NEVER happens on eBay:-) Right?). Still, I think this would go a long way toward indicating the difference between true professional associates and the more common “open networkers” who don’t really have prior knowledge of the person they are connecting with.

This really goes back to Chris’s idea of layered metadata. A thumbs up/down push button rank with the option of then adding comments (or not) really sounds like a great solution here, and for lots of situations mentioned by others.

So Mario, just add the simpler ranking system and keep the sucky-ness at bay as long as possible.

First of all, congratulations to Chrish Brogan for a very timely article.

Well, I’d really appreciate to know what Mario Sundar could tell me on the following: Mario… Why the Customer Service staff remains silent after a couple of requests asking them for support regarding a couple of problems on my Home and Contacts Page? What’s the matter with them?

Both pages don’t open correctly… the second one opens as a blank page, no names, no links to their profiles, no nothing…

From Mario to Mario… Can you help me???

The cork board and the grouping contacts are two of the best ideas. I’d like to see more in depth coverage of the company’s and organizations people work for. Perhaps creating a partnership/community for people to read up on. Anyone can visit the company site, but perhaps adding a commentary system on what employment there is like would be useful for someone looking for specifics needs.

How about internal IM program? A way for contacts to connect if others are on at the same time, similar to what Facebook has done.

Just my two cents, but I think you gave LinkedIn some things to think about!