Plaxo & LinkedIn

Social networking is the "big thing" these days. It seems to be the way the teens and GenX's communication. Between MySpace and sending SMS's they own this space.

LinkedIn until recently was a system to link to professionals and folks within your industry. It really took off earlier this year and the networks grew a lot. They have now started to add a number of new features that add "social" concepts. Knowledge of contact and what they are doing. A place to ask questions of your network with answers shared between them all. You can incluse ALL the LinkedIn network for your answers. They encourage people to respond to questions.

You now see when someone in your network adds a new person to their network. You also see when they add something to their profile. It's starting to feel more like a social network.

Plaxo started out as a tool for sharing contact information. The value was in the ability for me to see any changes that someone made to their information. If they were keeping it up to date, my copy was also kept up to date. Pretty slick.

Now they have expanded it dramatically to incorporate the new "open social" platform for networks. Now you can hook up feeds from your other social or comm platforms. Each time I post to my blog, it gets logged in Plaxo and anyone with my contact info, sees that I've done this. And vice versa. Some folks in my network were blogging on subjects I didn't realize they were involved. I know them better now because of this.

It lets you aggregate your blog, FaceBook, Twitter, Jaiku, Picassa, Google Reader and several others. It's a great way to get you message out there and to see others message. That's obviously on TOP of keeping you contact info up to date. And all this for free. If you buy the premium version you get more synch options. Sync to your handheld, between your LinkedIn and Plaxo accoutn and others.