David Herrold

Decentralize me, please.

Posted by Dave | Filed under Communication, Social Networking, Technology, Usability

Our content is becoming decentralized…and we love it.

Most bloggers I know are tangled up in multiple social networks, photo sharing sites, messaging services, networking sites, bookmarking platforms and a plethora of addictive attention-grabbing web services.

The concept of a “web presence” has changed so drastically over the last several years it’s become difficult to tell people “where” you are online. Blogs or personal home pages used to be our single point of existence online. These were the places we could refer colleagues, friends, family, etc if they wanted to see “our website.”

That’s not the case today.

Our lives are now split into dozens of different networks and spread across the internet like strategically placed digital confetti. We are on Facebook to connect with old friends and meet new ones. We are on LinkedIn to find jobs and stay connected to our business contacts. We are on Flickr to share our lives in photos. We are on Twitter because we have five spare seconds in line at the grocery store and saw something funny we need to share with the world. We are on Del.icio.us to keep track of all the amazing links we find and StumbleUpon to share them with the world.

Like a cheesy Zen proverb, we’re everywhere.

This is both frustrating and fantastic at the same time.

The fantastic part can be found in the amazing services we have access to for free. These services have connected old friends, gotten people out of foreign jails and made grandparents smile at newborn baby photos.

The frustrating part is trying to pull it all together. Some sites are friendly and speak to other sites; but most don’t. More often than not, our collection of platforms and services float like little islands unconnected in any meaningful way. We are forced to keep asking the same friends to connect with us on multiple services.

Some very smart people are working on pulling it all back together, but it still appears to be stuff of dreams at this point.

For now, many of us simply link all our networks, sites and services somewhere on our blog (as I’m doing in the right sidebar of this site). It’s not ideal, but until someone figures out how to bridge our isolated islands in a meaningful way, it’s what we’re forced to do.

What do you think? Will we end up with connected islands?

Photo by Harris Graber

Tags: Blogging, del.icio.us, facebook, flickr, linkedin, open social, openid, social networks

LinkedIn launches company profiles

Posted by Dave | Filed under Communication, Networking, Social Networking

LinkedIn recently launched Company Profile pages that display detailed information on companies like the Houston Chronicle. I must have forgotten the shear volume of data LinkedIn has from all of its members diligently entering all their connections, past jobs, associations and groups.

I thought it was pretty interesting to include information on popular career paths (jobs before and after) and other companies most connected to (see screenshot to the left).

This is a nice addition to LinkedIn, however, it looks like they plan on adding even more functionality to the profiles eventually:

Coming soon, companies will be able to do the following to their LinkedIn company profile:

* post targeted jobs, recruitment videos, and other promotional material for recruitment
* post information about products and services
* upload company images
* and more…

This sounds great, but I’m betting LinkedIn charges for some of these new services…especially job posting. They’d be crazy not to.

The age, sex, title and school breakdown of employees within the company are also very interesting data to consider. I think you could learn a lot about a company by giving these stats a quick glance.

The stats will likely be skewed to younger and more technically savvy employees because the data comes from only registered LinkedIn users (not every employee in the company). But, hey I could be wrong.

It would be more accurate if it came from the HR departments of each company, but that would fairly labor intensive for LinkedIn to pull together.

The last feature I think is interesting is the “Popular Profiles.” Not sure why I showed up in that list, but it gets me one step closer to becoming the most popular David Herrold on the internet.

At which point I will retire and dispense wisdom from a mountain top.

Here is the link to the Houston Chronicle’s company profile on LinkedIn.

Enjoy.

Tags: linkedin, Networking, Social Networking

LinkedIn redesign

Posted by Dave | Filed under Communication, Social Networking, Software, Usability

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

LinkedIn launched a redesign of their site tonight that looks pretty good.  I hit their site while they were launching and it looked like they were having CSS issues.  Turns out they were launching a redesign.

Upon first inspection, the sites looks more user friendly, but that’s more of an instinctual opinion than anything.  It just feels easier to use.

I plan on playing around with it in the near future and posting my comments here.

What do you think?

Tags: linkedin, redesign, Social Networking

Mobile sites: a few of my favorites

Posted by Dave | Filed under Mobile, Technology, Usability, Web design

Mobile LinkedIn is fantastic.

I just noticed today that LinkedIn (my work-related social networking site of choice) has launched an amazing mobile site. It feels nearly as robust as their full-featured site for searching and sending invitations.

I’m always shocked at how some mobile sites can tailor their user experience to give the perception of full functionality (even if that’s not the case).

Google and Yahoo offer many of their mobile applications & searches (calendar, maps, docs, email, etc). Mobile Google Maps has been the most impressive of the lot, in my opinion.

Bank of America allows you to check balances, pay bills, transfer money, etc. with your mobile browser.

Netflix allows you to search for movies and add them to your queue. This seems exceptionally handy if you are chatting with friends and someone mentions a movie you should see. You can immediately add it to your queue while you’re thinking of it.

I would be remiss if I didn’t pimp our very own mobile.chron.com in this blog post. I think we do a decent job of presenting diverse content (weather, news, sports, obituaries, etc) content in a very small space.

Mobile news sites such as the New York Times, CNN, Chicago Tribune, etc. offer some great mobile news user interfaces.

One of my favorite search tools is called Wapepedia. It is a simple mobile interface for Wikipedia.

You can find a lot more great mobile sites at cantoni.mobi.

Do you have any favorite mobile sites you find yourself using on a regular basis?

Tags: Blackberry, iPhone, linkedin, Mobile, Treo, WAP, wireless

Open social

Posted by Dave | Filed under Communication, Productivity, Software, Web design

Here’s a great post on SixApart’s website on the subject of Open Social:

Take a spreadsheet, for example: Imagine if a simple spreadsheet could be shared on one of the services you use, but limited so only your friends could see it, for a fantasy sports league; or only your family could see it, for a Christmas wishlist; or only your coworkers could see it, for sensitive business information. You’ve probably already set up groups or buddy lists for those people on the various social networking sites that you use, but there hasn’t been an easy way yet for a developer to let you access those networks right from within an application. Now, there will be. And if your work network is on LinkedIn, but your friends are on MySpace, and your family’s on Vox, it can all Just Work.

You can read the whole article here.

Tags: Google, linkedin, myspace, open social, Social Networking