I can recall building CP/M machines from Heath Zenith kits. I also recall paying $200 for the privilege of soldering 32k of memory onto my Radio Shack Color Computer. My dad as a professor of chemistry was on the Internet from pretty early on, and I recall the "miracle" of instant mail. I also recall the earliest days of the Internet when it was almost all academics (Al Gore and I invented it you know). Anyway, those days seem as anachronistic as the PC pictured on the right. Yesterday, I picked up a 512MB USB drive free after rebates (512MB is now too small to be considered useful and they are being discontinued).Recently I started playing more seriously with online services for tracking people. What we are now calling social networking. My goal was part personal part professional. Having just relocated to the Boston area after 10 years in A^2 (Ann Arbor) I felt a little cutoff.
My first stop was LinkedIn. I have had a LinkedIn account for years, Charu made me get one when he went back to India. However, I hadn't touched it in a long while. When I opened it I found a stack of messages some a year old. Guess I hadn't been a very good online citizen.
At the same time I created a MySpace profile. On the surface myspace seemed a better bet. You could list bands/entertainment/hobbies you name it. Myspace was designed for social networking of the social type and LinkedIn was designed for social networking of the professional type. However, in any social network one of the most important things is who is in the network. Both services let you import your contact list. I keep my contacts in Outlook and I sync that to a Palm E2 and Yahoo. Anyway, one quick import later and 20 contacts out of the 200 I had in Outlook were matched to LinkedIn. Same process repeated for myspace yielded one person, one of the few under 30's I know.So the first round goes to LinkedIn, it is much easier to just link to someone in the network than to badger people you know into networking, thought that didn't stop me from trying to get a select few to join LinkedIn.
Next leaving both accounts at their default settings a couple of people I knew from way back found me (through LinkedIn). Wow, networking with minimal work that is kind of nice. Despite, or possibly because of, listing myself as married with kids and happy the only people on myspace who seemed to find me were people with "pictures too hot for myspace." A quick discussion with my under 30 friend and I corrected my profile so you needed my email to contact me. That ended the annoying offers but nobody legitimate has tried to contact me either.
Putting my work experience into LinkedIn tied me back to even more past colleagues,
Nathaniel who is running his own businesses NGP and Lisa who is running international elections . For those of you who are wondering where the Engineers are yes I have a couple of contacts at Rowan, Virgina Tech, and two universities overseas. So at least for my purposes LinkedIn seems the way to go. I also learned that when my daughter and then son asks for an online profile we will have to be careful. I was also interested that making my LinkedIn profile public somehow got my LinkedIn profile onto the first page of "Justin Shriver" Google hits. Of course the all time leader (that is actually mine) is a trivial utility I wrote once that got incorporated into a very popular (for control systems) web tutorial.
Some other notes about LinkedIn usage. I find it handy to use a personal email as you main contact email for LinkedIn. Part of the value of these services is getting and establishing connections and these days professional addresses are often short lived. I have also found that checking the networks of my friends helped me get back in touch with some people I had fallen out of touch with. I have also found that at least looking at some of the questions asked in my network section is useful, I have met some interesting people that way as well.
