My Unofficial A-Z of Online Networking

A - AlwaysOn: bloggers paradise for west-coast geeks. Not the place to post random musings of a life-coach.

B - Blackstars: got four grand to spare? Ecademy's lifetime membership, you get...a black star on your profile, and I think Thomas Power sends his personal thanks ;-)

C - Connections: secretly, it's what all these platforms are about.

D - DallasBlue: networking group on LinkedIn run by Marc Feedman, Who's Your LinkedIn Daddy, Again? ;-)

E - Ecademy: the most open platform for online business networking. Claim your space amongst the world's freelancers & self-employed. MySpace for the over 30's.

F - Frappr: put all your connections on a big map. Just don't ask me why.

G - Go Big Network: want to raise some cash for your next big adventure. Pop over to Go Big and rub shoulders with VC's, Angel Investors and fellow entrepreneurs.

H - Lars Hinrichs: CEO of openBC.

I - Invitations: every platform grows by getting us to invite people to "join our network". That's why they all make it so easy to trawl your outlook contacts and send out invitations. The best example of this was Doostang, which cleverly piggy-backed on LinkedIn 's success by allowing you to retrieve all your LinkedIn contacts and send an invitation to them. The resulting invitation avalanche was so successful it broke the boys' server :-)

K - Konstantin Guericke: LinkedIn's co-founder and the offical guy who dukes it out on many a Yahoo!Group. Always worth keeping an eye on to see what's in the pipeline for LinkedIn

L - LinkedIn - what more can I say? 5,500,000+ people can't be wrong.

M - MyLinkedinPowerForum: The oldest, largest and wildest of the LinkedIn Yahoo!Groups.

N - Networks: Duh?

O - open BLOG: musings of team behind Xing.

P - Profile: the heart of every online network. Vary from Ecademy's HTML happy, free expression to LinkedIn's CV inspired feel. Contrast my profiles on Ecademy and LinkedIn to see what I mean.

Q - Quality vs Quantity: that old chestnut? Get over it.

R - Ryze: MLM anyone?

S - Soflow: seems to be still battling it out to get that elusive critical mass. Attracts the media & marketing crowd.

T - TopLinked: The unoffical LinkedIn chart. So, where am I nowadays?

U - Über-connector: a super-connector on openBC

V - Virtual Handshake - get the book or read their blog. Has a useful directory of Online Network/Social Software companies.

W - Web Profiles: get googled and found on Ecademy, openBC, LinkedIn and Soflow.

X - Xing: openBC was relaunched as "Xing" in Nov 2006. Shortly after, they successfully completed an IPO in Frankfurt last week, valuing the company at 157M Euros. Largely a cosmetic overhaul at the time, but a very nice one (and no mean feat for a live site with 1M+ users).

Y - Yahoo!Groups: Want to get the gossip, find out about future upgrades or maybe you're just a rebel at heart? Sign up to MyLinkedInPowerForum, LinkedInnovators, or LinkedIn Lions

Z - Zaibatsu: I didn't know what it was either until I joined AlwaysOn.

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