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.

Some of the music I grew up with

www.Jango.com

Jott

Picture this: driving home from work you remember a task that MUST be done tomorrow but can't fool with your handheld to write it down. Because of this task you are going to be late for a meeting tomorrow morning. You also know that by the time you get home and deal with all the stuff there you'll probably forget again. How are you going to deal with this.

How about using your cell phone to call in an email message to the team that you will be late and they should start without you but be sure to cover topic xyz first thing. You then leave a message for yourself to SMS you in the morning to not forget to take care of that task.

You can do all these things with Jott. You can also phone in a blog entry, Twitter entry or even an entry into I Want Sandy (we'll talk about this utility in another blog entry).

Jott is a voice recognition system that knows your contact list along with a number of special application entries. You call into it and the Jott lady asks you "who do you want to Jott?" You say a name and she verifies it to you. Then just talk normally and she'll transcribe your voice into text. She does a pretty darn good job at this. When you're done, she sends the message either as a voice attachment or a transcribed message to their stored email. Pretty slick.

The special apps know how to post to your blog, send a twit or jaiku or even send a message to Remember the Milk or to Sandy as your reminder and task management. Another connection is to an expense reporting tool where you tell it the location, cost and other details of a business expense. It gets entered into the expense reporting system ready for you to process it when you get a chance.

Try Jott.com I think you too will find it useful.

Dave