Professional networking



:: Professional networking ::

  • LinkedIn
    “… an online network of more than 4.8 million experienced professionals from around the world, representing 130 industries. When you join, you create a profile that summarizes your professional accomplishments. Your profile helps you find and be found by former colleagues, clients, and partners. You can add more connections by inviting trusted contacts to join LinkedIn and connect to you. Your network consists of your connections, your connections’ connections, and the people they know, linking you to thousands of qualified professionals. Through your network you can: Find potential clients, service providers, subject experts, and partners who come recommended / Be found for business opportunities / Search for great jobs / Discover inside connections that can help you land jobs and close deals / Post and distribute job listings / Find high-quality passive candidates / Get introduced to other professionals through the people you know”
    » http://www.linkedin.com
  • Viadeo
    “Join 1,800,000 business professionals on Viadeo and:

    • Find clients, suppliers, colleagues or business partners
      Increase your visibility for recruiters and partners
      Exchange information in professional forums
      Set up appointments and organise events
      Discover the background, skills and interests of the people you work with
      Get back in touch with former classmates or colleagues”

    » http://www.viadeo.com

  • Ryze
    “Ryze helps people make connections and grow their networks. You can network to grow your business, build your career and life, find a job and make sales. Or just keep in touch with friends. Members get a free networking-oriented home page and can send messages to other members. They can also join special Networks related to their industry, interests or location. More than 1,000 organizations host Networks on Ryze to help their members interact with each other and grow their organizations.”
    » http://ryze.com
  • iKarma
    Darn! here’s the implementation of an idea I had a couple of years back when looking through Yellow Pages for a glazier. “… your reputation says everything about you – who you are, what you do, and what others think about you. … iKarma.com provides all the tools you need to document and promote your reputation with trust and convenience.”
    » http://www.ikarma.com
  • Opinity
    “Using Opinity’s services, you can build a trustworthy identity that can easily be communicated to others online. Your Opinity Reputation Profile can contain a rich portrait of who you are, what you have done, and what others think about you. You can choose to have your information verified. You can verify ownership of online identities, blogs, and even book authorship. In the near future, you will also be able to verify the details of your education, work background, and other elements of your personal history. Note that this process is under your control. You choose what information to give and verify. Also, through reading other Opinity users’ profiles, you can find out about others before you interact with them online or offline. And if you have already had an experience with someone, either online or offline, you can write a review and let others know about your experience with that person.”
    » http://www.opinity.com
  • zoominfo
    Not really ‘professional networking’ so much as a smart Web 2.0 search engine for locating people and companies.�? “ZoomInfo is a unique summarization search engine that finds, understands and saves useful information about people on the Web. The patented search technology continually scans millions of corporate Web sites, press releases, electronic news services, SEC filings and other online sources. Then, it intelligently compiles a concise summary about a specific individual or company. ZoomInfo is one of the most sophisticated automatic content generation systems in the world. Every piece of ZoomInfo data is extracted and compiled by computer, with no human intervention. Company engineers built ZoomInfo by combining proprietary Natural Language Extraction, Artificial Intelligence Algorithms and Information Integration logic.” See the Technology Overview.

:: Reputation and trust ::

  • Venyo
    ” The lack of trust has always been an issue on the Internet and it will not get better with the emergence of new collaborative services particular to Web 2.0. More and more people are blogging, sharing, publishing or selling but what about the quality and the reliability of the published material ? … it would help to have access to a unified and standardised measure of the reputation of each active user. And that is all about the Venyo Project – to build a free and universal online reputation management tool.”
    » http://www.venyo.org
  • Spock
    A ‘trust network’: although billing itself as pre-eminently a “people search application” where “you can build your network to find where everyone you know is on the internet, it additionally encourages you to “enhance your search experience even further by establishing a trust relationship with people in your network, allowing you to search each other’s networks for relevant people.”
    » http://www.spock.com

Professional and personal identity

  • OpenID
    “OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity. OpenID starts with the concept that anyone can identify themselves on the Internet the same way websites do-with a URI (also called a URL or web address). Since URIs are at the very core of Web architecture, they provide a solid foundation for user-centric identity.”
  • ClaimID
    “ClaimID is a service that lets you manage your online identity. Imagine that you are applying for a job. You know that your prospective employer is going to search for your name online, and since you’re a rational person, that worries you. How will your employer know what online stuff is actually about you, and not about that other person who shares your name? And what if the good stuff about you online doesn’t mention your full name, or uses a name you no longer go by (such as a maiden name)? How would your prospective employer ever find it? Why do you have to lose out in the eyes of that employer? And the worst part is there’s no way for you to easily influence what search engines say about you. Enter claimID. ClaimID is a service that lets you claim the information that is about you online. That information is then associated with your name, providing folks an easy way to see what is and isn’t about you online. In doing so, you get to influence the search engines, and provide people more relevant information when they search for you. It’s time to reclaim some power back from the search engines. ClaimID is about letting you have some say in what search engines say about you. We believe that search engines have been having the final say about our identities for too long (have you looked yourself up in a search engine lately?). ClaimID lets you classify, annotate, prioritize and share the information that is about you, so that people who search for you are able to see the identity you want to present. It’s a really simple idea, and we’ve worked hard to build a system that is incredibly easy to use, so that just about everyone can benefit from claimID.”