Liquid HR

Linkedin Becoming the 500 Pound Recruiting Gorilla

Linkedin is starting to become the 500 pound HR gorilla. Fine by me. It has long since evolved past the novelty of being a simple social rolodex. It's got applications, status microblogging, "like" features, groups, and all the other things you're familiar with. And it's had, as we know, job postings -- including those direct to candidate (for which candidates can express a preference).

What I find interesting are two points:

-The continued evolution of profile details.

Over the months and years there are more details that people can use to describe themselves. Linkedin looks like it's just released the ability to add languages, certifications, patents, publications, and skills.

You know, I don't want to sound full of myself, but I have to wonder whether linkedin is slowly executing the vision I attempted with liquid-cv. A centralized place for a standardized CV / resume. These fields look a lot like the HR-XML standard fields. I'll ask around to see if this is exactly what they're doing.

-The semantic (AI) layer being applied towards looking for jobs.

That is, the "Jobs you may be interested in" section. I love it. It's taking all that profile information we are slowly structuring through tags and enhanced profile details and matching it to job specs. Seems to come up with some good suggestions -- a hell of a lot better than some of the crap that recruiters have called me about in the past.

I think Linkedin has the muscle to pull off driving the Liquid HR vision in full force. 

This will crush many traditional recruiting companies. Good. There will be some that survive and evolve of course. I talked recently to a company that sells into recruiters, and there definitely was the fear of linkedin -- like the Microsoft of the recruiting world that can just eat your lunch if it wants to. 

iProfile re-revisited. Does it work?

So in my last post I reviewed the iprofile CV publication product, and had an overall favorable view of it from a strategic standpoint. So now I've come to the big test: it looks pretty, but does it work?

The Process:

On February 2, I updated my online CV profile -- i.e., my iProfile -- and opened access to four recruitment agencies (spring.com, volteurope, JM group, glotel)...and I guess I must have left Abraxus on the list as well, since they apparently viewed my profile. So I click on "my connections" to confirm who should have access...and I keep getting an error message. Over and over - the rest of the menu works, however. 

So I head over to volteurope.com. I browse a few jobs, find one I like, and click "apply now." I get the usual webform asking me to write in a cover letter and upload my CV. Hmm. I look at the form again and find a "login" option. Perhaps I can use this to leverage my iProfile. I try some email addresses, including my iProfile associated email address, and none of them work. Hmm. OK, so I just go ahead and register. Then find a job and try to apply. Again, no reference to iProfile

Strike 1. Darn. I thought by having an iProfile, I wouldn't have to upload yet another CV! Shouldn't iProfile be integrated with Volteurope, so that when I apply for a job, I just click a button, and my iProfile is utilized?

So I then go to spring.com. I'll cut it short. My experience is the same. What am I missing?

For me, the point for a portal like iProfile is to empower me. I can't see how iProfile does that. It doesn't seem to invite a lot of attention from recruiters, and I can't see how it helps me distribute my CV to recruiters. I hesitate to make conclusions, because I feel like I have to be missing something, but maybe not..!?

Liquid HR View:

One thing I did notice along the way on the Volt Europe site, however: I was offered an email address if I wanted to query about the job. The email address was something like this:

person.12343.123@volt.aplitrak.com

Aplitrak? Hey -- that's the Broadbean application! Remember, Broadbean distributes jobs to various job boards on behalf of recruiters and hiring companies. Does this mean Volt Europe does not have jobs of its own? If so, the house of mirrors is complex, and iProfile is a like a layer upon a layer upon a layer of jobs. (And Volt Europe doesn't seem to be integrated with iProfile, at least in any consumer friendly way that I could find). If all of this were true, the value chain looks something like this:

Iprofile ?-> VOLT <- Broadbean <- job source

Maybe VOLT publishes its jobs via Broadbean, however, but utilises Aplitrak to post those jobs back to its own website.

iProfile ?-> VOLT <-> Broadbean -> job board.  

Once again, I have determined there is a lot of air in this industry. Could somebody point me to the job source, please?  On the other hand, the industry is becoming more liquid. The Liquid HR economy is beginning to become reality as jobs are passed around. And guess what will happen next? Those that don't add value to this process will start to be eliminated.

Conclusion:

Back to iProfile, and apologies for this discursive blog. I guess I don't get it. It looks beautiful, but someone will need to explain to me why the iProfile service is something I want. Maybe I just need to allow many more recruiters to access my account.

I wonder whether the guys at iProfile got the portal and consumer front end together, but forget about the backend or never really understood the strategy.

Anyway, hate to sound nasty, but I have to call it like I see it. Good luck fellas, somebody make some comments and show me I'm wrong about all of this.

Zubka Review II: The Vengeance

So I've received emails from Zubka offering me thousands of pounds if I refer somebody in a particular position. With such enticement, I went straight back to the Zubka website and was greeted by a logon screen with such giant characters and big buttons that even Web 2.0's standard for dumb and simple interfaces seems to have been eclipsed. I pressed on.

If you don't recall, Zubka's business model is to faciliate middle-men. It gets ordinary folks like you and me to make job referrals by offering us bounties for successful candidates. Not a bad idea, though I was uncertain where it would go during my first review.

Having returned to Zubka, I don't yet see any huge advances in terms of the website, but I'm not sure it really needed any. What's more important is quite simply whether people are posting jobs and referring candidates....so I plow on...

I see 479 postings, with an average reward of roughly 4% of the annual salary per job, and Zubka's basic fee is supposedly 8% of the job's salary - so half the bounty goes to Zubka, and half to the referrer. The average job looks like it has been sitting there for about 2 weeks, which means these postings are refreshed about 24 times a year. Therefore, it looks as if there's enough volume through the system here for the folks at Zubka to make a liveable wage.

So I suggest the formula is something like this: of the jobs that are posted (X), how many of those are real jobs (Y), how many of those are not filled by other means (Z), and finally: how many remaining will be filled by avid Zubka users (the magic number)?

If I'm incredibly generous with revenue projections, and conservative with costs (say 4 full time people), I can see them making a profit of about 315,000 GBP annually, but I think the real number is closer to about 100K, and could even be lower. While that's great for a lifestyle business, it won't satisfy the VCs. Given that they received investment from Benchmark Capital, and had over 2 million investment by Q1 2007, I think they're falling way behind.

I watched a video of one of the co-founders, David Shieldhouse, and he seemed to be singing music to my ears. "Disintermediation of the recruiting agency...needs to happen." But then he also indicated there was some surprise internally at the lack of takeup of their services. Then he indicated that a lot of recruiters are actually using Zubka, which is what I had guessed. He also said he hoped Zubka would help eliminate the non-value adding recruiters that "match one word on a CV to a job spec." What a wonderful vision! (See all of my earlier postings).

Well, you recall my rather bearish outlook on Zubka from a previous post: recruiters are really the only ones that are going to want to invest the time and take the cash-up-front risk. So really Zubka is just becoming a cloud computing service for the recruiters. That makes some money, but fundamentally means they probably won't be creating or recreating an industry in a way necessary to have explosive growth.

Well, I like to imagine that my projections and strategic readings were correct, so I'll go ahead and pat myself on the back. As far as Zubka goes - it's at best an incremental step in the right direction. But it aint the next big thing. Why? Well, I'm feeling a bit prophetic at the moment, so I'll let the Zubka guys give me a call and buy me a pizza before if they want to hear that. So far, I've gotten two free pizzas.

Return from Sabbatical

Apologies for the long absence, readers, but this (your) blogger was out for the summer season + a month or two. In subsequent posts, we're going to go back to basics, walking over some of the old ground to see how much closer to the Liquid Economy we have come. We'll take another look at:

• Linkedin (Can't avoid it. Are they really adding 3000 users per day?)
• Xing
• Naymz
• Notch(ed?)Up
• iProfile (SkillsMarket)
• Open Social

...And others that have popped up. We need to find out how close we've come to terminal velocity in this industry (free jobs? cheap CVs?). We need to see how much closer the Internet and the Intranet have come to merging. And we'll have to take a look at it knowing that the financial sky is falling. Are mergers and acquisitions in the works? What does it mean that Broadbean has been acquired?

By the way, it was just announced that Totaljobs and CWjobs won the National Online Recruitment Aware (NORA). I was at that party before another dinner engagement called me to an early departure. But the Samosa I had before I left was not bad. Actonomy hands the award over to Totaljobs..? Is this the same contest from year to year? I can't complain too much - I missed the awards ceremony, so I don't know how they came to that decision. But needless to say both of these companies are on my radar for a in-depth assessment.

Anyway, now that Batman has finally been done justice in the last two movies, I tend to think of myself as The Joker in this industry. You'll see. Welcome back.

Naymz.com business model and context

So I got the latest invitation several weeks back for Naymz.com. Yet again, I'm sure this newcomer is experiencing that sudden burst of hockey stick growth. The formula goes something like this:

1: Come up with a good concept (yes, I'll give you that) for an online networking or HR firm.
2: Create a nice easy to use interface - Web 2.0. style.
3: Get some early users to bang out the bugs - hopefully.
4: Create an incentive for inviting people (some way of giving them money, either virutal or otherwise, usually).
5: Turn on the linkedin / plaxo contact books APIs to get your first burst of users. (i.e. "invite your friends from linkedin.com! click here...")
6: Enjoy the Hockey stick growth of users signing up.
7: ? I don't know what happens next. Do these companies succeed? Probably too early to tell.

So starting at point 1 above, Naymz is addressing the age-old dilemma of one's online reputation. If we do more business transactions online, trust and similar intangibles become more of an issue. This has been addressed before on other website, but perhaps not with the singular focus (and community) of Naymz. After all, Ebay has a well known rating system for buyers and sellers, but this (last I checked) is tied to Ebay transactions. Zoominfo and pipl and lots of other info aggregation websites try to bring pertinent information together from across the web to establish credibility for a person. But Naymz seems different enough to mention.

At first blush Naymz seems a bit unique in that it is a community site designed solely around people vouching for one another, while many of the others try to reach across the Internet to ascertain reputation information. But even then, you can make a comparison between Naymz and Rapleaf, which both aggregates information and allows users to rate one another. Heck, even their seals of approvals look the same. Outside of this feature, Naymz doesn't seem robust enough as a community to attract people.
Liquid CV also has a "trust rating" function, but this feature is not broadly marketed.

Now, Naymz seems to have another trick up their sleeve: for a premium, they'll make you easier to find on the Internet via a custom domain and search engine promotion,. Hmmm. On one hand, this crosses over into promotion /advertising, but on the other hand it helps pull people into the naymz site and the reputation domain. They'll also give you identity verification for this premium. However, when I looked at the Naymz identity verification service, it was Trufina -- that is, another website. Trufina sells its serve for 4.95 USD (I think a one time charge), while Naymz wants premium users to fork over 9.95 USD monthly. If you use Trufina (and, presumably, pass the verification check), it gives you Naymz reputation points. Fehh. I'd prefer monopoly money.

For the premium price, there are also some reporting features about who has visited your profile, but I felt them rather boring. Maybe just because I didn't see much of a teaser on the features.

The classic Internet questions remain: can they generate enough buzz and autonomy? As a community site, I would suggest not. As a personal service for broadcasting your Internet image...well, maybe. But here Naymz is getting into the domain of Google and nameservers. Providing a one-stop shop service for both reputation and personal advertising, particularly with a smooth Web 2.0 interface, is an interesting idea. But...I don't know...I'm not convinced. You need lots of features and reach across many Internet services, and great execution, assuming you don't have your own value to add.

On a bit of a tangent: if you want to provide an API for other sites to Mashup with you, people have to know that it's worth developing an interface for your API to pull reputation information. Naymz isn't even suggesting this as far as I can tell, but Rapleaf already has this (as does Zoominfo). I would like to integrate with Rapleaf, but thus far the reputation information just didn't seem accurate enough , and there aren't enough users, for an effective integration with Liquid CV's user base. None of my early adopters on Liquid CV could be found on Rapleaf's search. Just not enough reputation meat out there for me to dine upon.

Well, I think there is some value that Naymz could provide, and they might have some success after the early hockey stick burst (provided to them on the back of linkedin.com and others). But, I guess I'm just not that excited. It's a mashup. I hate to say it, but I'm on the verge of giving this company another lukewarm review. I'm getting bored with the site already. And of course, the perennial problem persists: facebook, linkedin, xing and others can just create a reputation feature and eat the lunch of the little guy here.

I'll keep digging on the site, and put this on my list of companies and technologies to revisit (like the open social API, itzbig, and others) in a subsequent posting. For now, that's enough.

Notchup.com: hockey stick or hokey shtick?

Notchup.com is a new website with a cool idea. Recruiters pay members to interview them for jobs. It targets more senior professionals and sleeper candidates who already have a job, not the desperate jobhunters who are giving their CV away. This will mean that recruiters do more groundwork and prequalification before calling upon the candidate for the interview. It will therefore also mean that a higher percentage of these "calls" will translate into job offers.

Given the business model and the target audience, discretion is pretty important. So there are some less-than-airtight features designed to protect you from over exposure: you can be invisible to recruiters who use certain domains (e.g., mycurrentcompany.com) - a way to keep your current company from seeing you. Also, you can preclude recruiters from seeing you altogether -- and be visible only to hiring companies. Furthermore, you can indicate that you are "Happy, but will listen at the right price" to a pitch - a statement that's a little less offensive should your current company's HR rep find your profile on notchup.

Well, I gather notchup.com has just begun to experience exponential growth in first time users. According to an insightful business week article, they went from 200 users to 70,000 users in a few days, who then invited 900,000 more. Having read a little bit about it in techcrunch.com, I received an invitation soon after from an old B-school classmate who works at Bain consulting. This would indicate a pretty high profile average user. Of course, when I found out that I get 10% of the interview cash generated from colleagues that I sign up, I shamelessly invited my entire linkedin.com contact portfolio. (Hopefully, my contacts that are senior have developed quick and painless methods of filtering out invitations in which they have no interest.)

My Analysis:

Hmmm. At first glance, I really like this idea. Companies pay recruiters for their services already, so simply redirecting a bit of that cash to the candidates shouldn't be too hard. Professionals who ordinarily wouldn't interview are tempted to do so - tempted by money. But I think the market is a bit smaller than one might think when you look at it. Various things chip away at the business model:

1: The cash-up-front problem. Companies generally hire recruiters on a contingency basis, which means recruiters will have to pony up the cash in order to talk with a candidate. Recruiters will do more groundwork and prequalification before calling upon the candidate for the interview - which means a higher placement rate and less candidate time wasted. But it will also shrink the candidate pool and the number of transactions.

2: The dearth of pay-me purists. People that are working but open to hearing about new jobs may not want to put up a money-barrier for potential recruiters. Really, we have to ask the fundamental question: who is the buyer and who is the seller? Who has the power -- the candidate or the hiring firm? It depends on the job market - but note, we're heading for international recession right now. Candidates who have the power are generally pretty senior, and there's a headhunting market already in place for them which offers more discretion than a Web 2.0 site like notchup.com. And a little bit of cash aint much to the most senior people - certainly not worth risking their reputation.

3: The classic network leakage problem. If I see someone on notchup.com, can't I just contact her via linkedin.com, and avoid being asked to pay her cash? It depends on how tough that professional is -- how much he or she adheres to using the notchup.com website. Interestingly, notchup.com allows you to import your profile and contacts from linkedin.com. This implies that users on notchup can often be found on linkedin - leading to network leakage.

And there's no way for notchup to really respond to this. If notchup were to launch social networking features, it would dilute the website's singular purpose and eat away at the privacy and discretion of its (already-employed) members, not to mention put notchup in the hyper-competitive social networking market. Furthermore, what's to stop Linkedin.com from adding a "pay me to interview me" feature?

Well, notchup is something of a fit for the Web 2.0 Liquid HR economy -- it is helping to standardize HR information by utilizing Linkedin profiles. But this just in: apparently there may be legal constraints put on the model as well -- apparently, linkedin is angry that their user information has been mined by notchup in violation of terms and conditions. Notchup is not providing new information to the mix -- it's just another place with regular member profiles (often imported from linkedin). Therefore, it's not an Information Provider. Nor is it a Conduit for information (linkedin is the conduit in this story). As a Matchmaker, it is providing some service by adding new incentives to bring people together, so I guess that's the notchup play. I think this company will make it, but won't have stellar growth: its market is too vulnerable.

Review of itzbig: itznotworking yet

This will be a short post. What the hell does this website do? Some HR pundit out there who I should probably not annoy extolled itzbig on some blog somewhere. It sounded to me as if the itzbig guys were using a matching engine for CVs and Jobs (nothing really new there) to tell you what skills you might need in order to be eligible for a wider range of jobs (kind of new, but poses problems). But when I went to investigate, and first landed on the website, it basically told me, the would-be job seeker, “piss off, there’s no jobs for you.” The next time, it told me to “piss off, we have your email address already.” I didn’t bother with the employer section yet – because why bother if the website tells candidates to piss off? Anyway, I’m annoyed. I’m annoyed because this website was hyped. I'm annoyed because this website looks like it has a nice Web 2.0 interface but secretly is hard to use - at least for me, the dumb user. Itzbig, improve yourself and come back to me in 1 month’s time. Get out of Beta, or whatever.

iProfile (SkillsMarket) review: dying for web 2.0

I'm not sure how to structure my review of iProfile (note, the URL is www.iprofilecentral.com), given the confusion I experienced while getting familiar with their service. Much of this confusion stems from a fundamental assumption I made at the beginning: that iProfile is a consumer offering. In fact, while it has great potential benefit for job seekers, it really is an HR infrastructure play at this point.

Let me start over. iProfile is a service that allows candidates to create an online CV / resume which can then be kept standard across many recruitment agencies. The service is created by the Skills Market, who also offer related HR services. The idea is that rather than maintaining your CV on many recruiters' websites (databases), you can maintain it once and use it across all compatible recruiters. I found, however, that despite this seemingly wonderful attempt at standardization of data, there are some problems.

The root of the problems is that iProfile does not own the customer relationship - yet. The compatible recruiters do. You would never know about iProfile unless a compatible recruiter's website mentioned it. And you have to use some Google magic to find the registration form on the iProfile website (assuming you know about the website). After I found the registration form, I was told that my iProfile account had been created already - when I, erstwhile, uploaded my CV to some recruitment firm's website.

Now, the problem goes beyond simple marketing reach. After (re)registering with iProfile, I logged in and viewed my iProfile CV details, which were a mess. Personal details were in my objective. Companies where I had worked were missing altogether, etc. Why was it a mess? Undoubtedly my word doc CV was parsed (translated) into iProfile format, relying on CV/resume parsing software which is notoriously inconsistent. So I edited my account by hand.

Most recruiter's websites allow you to upload a word doc or text CV; they don't require users to fill out complex CV forms for fear of annoying potential candidates. Therefore, if iProfile is fronted by recruiters' websites, then most iProfile CVs are probably junky until you (knowingly) fix them up.

Next, I registered with two sites on the iProfileExchange list (preferred-it and lorien resourcing), and saw no initial mention of iProfile -- only a simple CV uploading form. So, there was no way for me to know (if I didn't already) that these firms were compatible. A day later, I was emailed an acknowledgement that preferred-IT was iProfile compatible, and that I could check on my iProfile account, which I did, only to find that my CV was again a mess! It seems my uploaded and parsed CV overwrote the edits I had made a day earlier.

OK, such a problem can be fixed with a programmer and a bit of time, but you can see where this is going. It seems like there's a weak alignment of incentives between recruiters and iProfile, and that iProfile is not leveraging consumer power to drive recruiters' behavior, which is in turn leading to poor implementation.

My Angle

Not all hope is lost! Also, according to various press releases on theSkillsMarket website, the company has 2 million iprofiles, is growing operations, and has just received 3 million GBP more in investment. Among other things the funds will be used to "Launch a new online portal, which will add advanced Web 2.0 functionality for candidates." Perhaps iProfile has been biding its time, building an infrastructure and relationships, and is going straight to the consumer now that it has some market power. With a proper online marketing campaign, iProfile can begin implementing a CV push - where candidates can write their CV once - as structured data - and distribute it outwards.

Somehow, I think the business relationships in place might suffer with such an CV-push offering, but it's the kind of thing we would like to see. (You know, I had an idea exactly like this once that slowly transformed into something else, but never mind that). But I have to wonder, if this is the plan, why didn't they do such a thing all along?

Could the SkillsMarket fit into the Liquid HR market? Clearly, it could. The iProfile is obviously contributing towards the standardization of data as its core offering, and it utilizes HR-XML (I'm pretty sure, as one of the SkillsMarket founders, who I once met, is a founder of the HR XML consortium for Europe). But what role does iProfile fulfill? Well, the forthcoming Web 2.0 frontend could include just about anything. As it stands, however, iProfile is not a Matchmaker (that's done by the compatible websites), nor an Information Provider. And this is where I believe the company is falling down: it is not yet a Conduit, either, because there is currently not enough incentive for compatible recruiters to share information, and candidates are not knowledgeable enough of iProfile or empowered to drive CV updates out through iProfile. Hence, not much data flow about candidates -- not a Conduit.

The verdict? If you're a recruiter or hiring company, check out the commercial requirements for partnership, and if they're not too steep, it's worth a thought. As for myself, I'm concerned about forcing my users into the kind of experience (i.e. profile overwriting) I had. For candidates, my jury is out - it doesn't seem like candidates are yet very empowered by iProfile. If you're an investor or industry person, I could be completely wrong about this business, but I'm wondering whether SkillsMarket has been too conservative in catering to the HR market in its old form to the detriment of its current growth and perhaps its future. I think the big bet is on the new Web 2.0 features. Tell me this company is highly profitable and prove me wrong, but I think these guys need to turn the corner still in order to realize their excellent potential. Otherwise, they're an HR integrator. We'll be watching!

Jobster.com the HR mashup

So Jobster.com is a jobboard mashup. It displays salary information for jobs from payscale.com, and various job postings via some kind of spider (I think) that pulls them from other sites – if they’re not directly posted to Jobster by members.

 

Hmm. There was a time when I looked at Jobster with grudging respect for its lovely big Web 2.0 features and smooth integration of the above features, but my sense now is that they’re jack of all trades, master of none. As a mashup, they have a decent web interface, but are not integrating enough features and services, not applying strict enough logic to the integration, and not consistently adding enough value to the whole mix.

 

My Analysis leads me to believe that people don’t seem to network there. The job postings seem redundant – I wonder whether the same position is often pulled from multiple sources. Blogging?...I think that’s gone now...

     

Now, their founders may chastise me as ignorant of their success – perhaps adsense and direct job posting revenues (a minimal fee) are making the company cashflow positive…but I have my doubts. Without a clear idea of what I am doing on a website, and what it can offer me, I tend to leave. I don’t want to network on jobster. I don’t want to search for jobs. I don’t want to be there. But, I do want to visit again in a few months.

            

Analyzing stuff...

 

While the network was undeveloped and the job board content seemed shakey, one feature of interest were the jobster's "inside scoop" feature, where members can talk about their experiences at certain companies. This seems to be available for companies with associated jobs posted directly to jobster. Unfortunately, as most jobs are pulled in from external sources, "inside scoop" is a very inconsistent feature. Additional tabs for members and jobs associated with the company reminds me a lot of Liquid CV's Corporate CV layout. [ Read more on the analysis ... ]

   

My suspicion is that Jobster shares our Liquid HR vision, but hasn’t found a way be a component in the Liquid HR economy. They hint at understanding the importance of bi-directional information, by providing members with a way to talk about experiences at the company. But this is a start – I don’t think the feature goes far enough to elicit or structure the feedback, and is inconsistent across the jobs and companies listed. Jobster hints at understanding the importance of standardization of information flow (by allowing job applicants to be exported via XML), and probably by importing some jobs via XML, but this doesn’t go far enough. Probably can’t get the partnerships (yet?). Jobster hints at understanding the important of Liquidity of Information Flow, by importing job postings as well as value-add services (e.g. payscale.com), but again, not far enough – the data (jobs) doesn’t seem to be clean. The member profile information is negligible.

   

My suspicion is that jobster is doing the right thing in trying what they’re trying, but their strategy is all over the place. Their mix of structure and unstructured information makes the interface messy and the user experience inconsistent. Their global, pan-industry focus distracts from capturing an audience or attracting specific jobs that might foster a better user community or more consistently structured information to accompany jobs.

Jobster, bless you for trying, bless you for being the leading competitor in the Liquid HR vision, and bless you for all your mistakes that we can learn from. We’ll watch. We’ll talk.

Google Open Social: stars are aligning

OK, if you recall there are three components of the Liquid HR Economy. What are they again?

1: Direction (Bi-direction) of information flow.

2: Liquidity of Information Flow.

3: Standardization of Information Flow.

And now Google has created OpenSocial, so I think we are making headway with Liquidity and Standardization. I'm going to take a deeper look and see what this API can do towards improving each of the Three. More on this later.

For the moment, I'm visiting blogs and websites that are discussing OpenSocial (is it one word or two?), and I'm starting to sense some mainstream reaction. People are asking: "what's Google getting out of this?" People are lamenting: "I like different social networks -- I like the exclusivity, the differences in rules; I don't want one big social network blob. I like the distinctiveness of different networks."

Q: What's Google getting out of this?

Well, let's begin at the beginning. Google's search engine service led to Google being the middleware platform for internet advertising, helping people put ads on websites (adwords, etc.). The Internet was the platform, and Google capitalized on its function as an ad medium.

Open Social is a strategic extension of that theme: people will use Google's API to again again target people, because social network context and activities are an even more accurate indicator of consumer intention and segmentation. Sorry, I know it sounds crass, but that's how it is, my fellow eaters.

Now let me be clear: ads mean a couple of different things. There are the obvious "Eat at Joe's!" ads (Adwords space), and there is the more abstract form of advertising, where we exploit a social network to get our application or widget used by more people. But, really, that's an ad too. Because it ends up attracting a target audience to our own service or website.

Facebook understands all of this, which is why they followed the growth of their network with an API, and are also launching their own "Eat at Joe's!" style ad platform. This then competes with Google's adwords -- not on the Internet, but on the social network. So naturally Google will counter attack -- if they weren't planning Open Social already. And as we all know, in the technology game, those who do not eventually follow the standard lose the war (unless they can set the standard, and I don't think Facebook can).

Q: Will social networks lose their distinctivess?

No. Pending my research efforts on the API, I'll have an opinion about how much you can really do with it, and what the ramifications are. But at this point, I wouldn't think of the API as a way to create applications for the social networks it accesses. It's a way to get information in and out of the system - it's a way to advertize. If you look on Facebook, the "applications" that people have written there are generally pretty simple, and they really don't break the rules or violate the spirit of the Facebook network. You're still just posting crap on other people's walls and sending them messages. Superpoke is just poke. Fun wall is just wall. So I think the fear that we will suddenly have zombie-biting applications on Linkedin is pretty unfounded. I'm relatively confident that further API investigation will reveal this.