Social networking - Colleague list

Submitted by murat on Sat, 2006-10-21 21:52.
I don't know how difficult it is to implement this, but it would be nice to have a tool to create a social network within our user profile. Let's say, from my profile I want to add other users to my colleague list. I realized that after conferences we start forgetting faces or names until we go to the next conference. I wonder what other people think about this.
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Submitted by davidg on Fri, 2006-11-17 22:48.

Hi Murat,

That's a very interesting idea!

There is an existing professional social networking service called LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) which might be worth a look.

A nice feature of LinkedIn is that you can browse not only your own contacts, but your contacts' contacts, and you can perform name or keyword searches through your "network" (your contacts, your contacts' contacts, and your contacts' contacts' contacts) to see who you are connected to and how you connect to them.

They also have some special features for professional associations like ISCA. They call this "LinkedIn for Groups":
www.linkedin.com/static?key=groups_info&trk=ftr_grps

The disadvantage of LinkedIn is that you can only add other LinkedIn users as contacts. I think only about half the people I have invited to join went ahead and created an account.

I have sent you an invitation to my contact list so you can check it out.

Submitted by murat on Mon, 2006-11-20 19:52.

Hi David, thanks for the invitation, I created an account and tested linkedin service. This is a very large scale network and the main motivation would be finding jobs through people that you know (although there is services such as creating group oriented networking). Since many people don't like creating accounts at many different places, I think it would be nice to have a smaller version of this type of service at this website. Personally I would prefer having everything related to my area here so that I can access with only one login :) Even if the colleague list is not that funtional at the beginning (maybe just an address book), I believe it will be useful to create project groups, to start using the website as an environment to collaborate. I would like to learn if other people would be interested in something like this. Any comments???

Submitted by mapb on Tue, 2006-12-05 23:36.

Yes it would be nice and for sure useful. One other thing i thought about, as for now, when in a profile one clicks on an interest topic like "--- phonology" s/he is brought to an empty page; instead, the best thing imho would be to see a list of users who have marked the same topic in their profile...
Well nice things are many... some are more quickly implementable, other less ;-)

Submitted by Christophe Van Bael on Wed, 2006-12-06 08:53.

There seems to be something wrong with the code there. Our intention is to group people according to their fields of interest, so the feature you described should work. We'll try to fix this asap.

Christophe.

Submitted by mapb on Tue, 2006-12-19 12:40.

Hi Chris,
i saw that now when clicking on a topic a list of users is returned, but it seems to me that the WHOLE list is displayed each time, and not only the users which marked the selected topic...

Best
Marco

Submitted by Christophe Van Bael on Tue, 2006-12-19 15:09.

That's right, Marco.

We are trying to solve this issue at this very moment. The solution does not appear to be straightforward though. Thanks for keeping such a close eye on the site and for keeping the pressure on us :-)

Christophe.