More LinkedIn

I am getting sucked into that thing called LinkedIn that I blogged about the other day. Yes, it is THAT good. If I were to measure the “goodness” of it, it’ll be just a bit under Flickr and just a bit above YouTube.

I was surprised to find out that not all features are available, or, should I say, so obvious on the first day of usage. The best of them, the real cream, comes on the second, third, and later days.

On the first day I’ve just created myself an account and filled in my profile with all the places I worked at and studied at. I also found some familiar people, got connected to them, and browsed through their contacts. That about it.

On the second day, when I logged in, I was presented with a whole bunch of news. First of all, there were news about my contacts. Some of those people updated their profiles, some quit jobs, some found new jobs, some added more contacts. I saw it all in a nice and clean way, with links for further information.

Then, further down the page, I was shown some statistics about my network. I was told how many people joined my network, how it expanded, etc, etc. And I had a link to even more statistics, which I will talk about in a minute.

Then, I had something totally unbelievable – three vacancies that met my specifications. All three in Europe, which I mentioned I was willing to relocate. And all three of these vacancies came from my own network of connections. That is not the complete “out of the blue”, but via people who I know via people who know… How cool is that?

Another sweet thing that I saw was information about new people entering LinkedIn, who studied in the same places that I studied at. It just said so in the most plain and simple way possible – “There is 1 new person from Intercollege”. And it was a link to that person’s profile. Wow. Really, really, nice.

Remember that statistics link I just mentioned above? Well, of course, I couldn’t pass it by. Click. Now I got even more stats, but, again, they were all nicely organized and presented in the most useful way. These new statistics told me everything about my network – locations, industries, growth and expansion, etc. I was also provided with links to profiles of people from my industry, nearby industries, remote industries, fast growing locations, random locations, new people from my own location, and so and so forth.

I think I’ve spent half of the day wondering around, learning about all the features and looking through all the people… Now it was time for more action.

I’ve sent invitations to many people, explaining to each of them what LinkedIn is and why they should join. Almost all of them did, by the way. Some of them just created a profile to “get rid of me”. Others proceeded to add their own contacts. My network is growing fast, as you can see from the image above.

With all these new contacts I started noticing that there are several ways I can reach new people, that I am connected to them via several of my contacts, and that some of my contacts know each other without even me knowing it. Even though, they live and work in different countries. Amazing!

With all that activity, introductions started to fly around. Introductions are this great feature of LinkedIn, which allows one person to ask another to forward an introduction to the third one. That is, if person A knows person B, who knows person C, person A can ask Person B to forward a letter to person C, so that they can get connected. It sounds a bit confusing, but it is extremely logical and very easily done at LinkedIn.

And so on, and so on, and so on…

It seems that features are endless at LinkedIn, and somehow they are all packed into this very intuitive and cool looking interface, which is a breeze to use. I’m almost speechless. I’m divng deeper and deeper into LinkedIn… C’mon you guys, dive with me!