ThoughtStorms Wiki
A SocialNetworkingSoftware, now owned by MicroSoft aimed at professional networking.
I ranted about it on UsefulPlatforms
Quora Answer : Why has no one disrupted LinkedIn so far?
Partly because no-one knows what LinkedIn actually DOES. So it's hard to know how to do it better. :-)
I used to say LinkedIn's strength was that it wasn't demanding. You just parked your CV there and so did everyone else. And that's it. You don't have to go back to it every day or even every week. And that was fine. There's a need for a site like that. Being the trusted place to keep up-to-date resumes and contacts was its niche.
Now it's woken up and decided it DOES want to be active and try to get me back there every day. It tries to push "news" at me. It looks more like Facebook. It has "discussions".
But none of this is particularly good. Quora does Q&A and discussion better. Facebook is a better Facebook. Twitter is a better Twitter. The newsy fragments are risible.
So it's starting to look increasingly devoid of any real vision or road-map to providing extra value.
The area that LinkedIn should be expanding in is in helping us manage more sophisticated "portfolio" styles of working. It should at least be looking at what's going at oDesk or (extreme example) Fiverr. Short term contracts are the future of work, so what if I have 50 jobs a year? But they all lasted a couple of days? How does my CV look then? What can LinkedIn do to help me find the next 10 or 20 gigs during the next two months?
What else should LinkedIn be telling me about how work is evolving and how should it be helping me increase my income? This seems a mission worthy of a site that aspires to be an internet giant like Facebook or Google. But I have little hope of seeing them rise to the challenge. I think scrappy little companies like Fiverr and About.me and even Behance (now part of Adobe) are leading the way here. (And as Jon Bischke reminds us, all those sites like GitHub / StackExchange that are part of our professional technical identities.)
Quora Answer : Should recruiters be able to pass your resume around?
What would be nice would be to be able to host a resume at somewhere like LinkedIn and set a number of "permission rules" on it. For example, I could allow individual recruiters to view it. Or say that companies with this profile should be able to view it. Or that recruiters can pass around this summary of it. Etc.
Contrast :
- MicroJobs sites like