"Tag You're It" - another cool openBC feature

Just noticed another cool feature on openBC - you can organise your contacts by tags.

Obviously, no self-respecting Web 2.0 site can get by nowadays with using tags. Ecademy uses them to cluster their marketplace listings. Wireless World Forum uses them for each member to show what topics they're tracking.

And now openBC allows you to add tags to each contact (the tags are only seen by you) so you can cluster contacts by "golf club", "ex-colleagues", "knows whats-his-face", etc.

What a useful tool.

Trouble is...now I'm wondering what I'm being tagged me as?

Technorati Tags - Online Networking, Social Networking, openBC,Ecademy,Wireless World Forum

Out in the open - platform development for openBC

openBC are in the process of re-designing their site.

And they've started a competition to put forward a new design for the profile page. You can find our all about it at the openDesign Project.

There are a few sample profiles on the site, no one's submitted an entry yet, but it's still very early days. I'm sure that this initiative will gather pace and produce some interesting results.

Looking at one of the in-house designs (#3) I noticed that you can see how how many people are online, and how many of your direct contacts are also online. With Skype integration, that's a great way to "get back in touch" and just ping them to see how they are and what's new.

Obviously, it's a mock-up profile but gives some hints about future functionality.

It's also an interesting contrast this with LinkedIn's development approach which is much more behind closed doors. New features are hinted at, launched and you kind of stumble across them.

Let's see how things develop...

Technorati Tags - Online Networking, Social Networking, openBC

List of Social Networking Sites

Thanks to a posting on Ecademy, I was pointed to this great list of social networking sites on Wikipedia.

Now we have a central place to keep and eye on, plus it'll be interesting to see how the user counts change.

I just updated LinkedIn's user count to 6,000,000 - which is the current number shown on their site.

Interestingly, Ecademy says "unknown"...I'll have to dig out my copy of "A Friend In Every City" as I'm sure it tells you in there :-)

Technorati Tags - Online Networking, Social Networking, Wikipedia

LinkedIn's New Update Profile Feature Rocks!

The new profile updates feature on LinkedIn is one of their best for some time.

It's so simple, and gets around all the problems we had with update-SPAM (people would abuse the updated feature to just blatantly promote their business)

Now, when you log in, you can see who's recently updated their profile. You can click-thru and then see what's they've changed..new job, new focus, etc.

A simple feature that naturally facilitates the networking process. Well done, LinkedIn!

Technorati Tags - Online Networking, LinkedIn