Linked(in) Life

I have been active in linkedin for quite sometime and as a part of spending less effort spending time looking for information, configured the feedreader (awesome rss aggregator) for linkedin and accidentally found that linkedin support rss feeds for the famous (infamous as i discovered later) Q&A section. With the comfort that feedreader provides to see the whole range of questions, i started subscribing and analysing several sections.

There were whole range of questions people were  asking . A few of them were

a) Who can help me building an access database?

b) How can i Help?

c) Are we expecting much from sales managers today?

d) What is the difference between business plan and feasibility study?

You can spend reading these hilarious questions and have a nice time and you dont need to look out for funny articles to relax your mood.

While linkedin looks very professional from outside, the more naive part of linkedin was a bit realistic and interesting to observe. I raised a few questions to test waters and for questions seeking information, there were not much answers and for controversial questions, people were piling (okay, a bit of a poetic exagerration) to answer.  Entangled in the question ocean, i ended up answering a few (was fun) to ensure my enlightment is shared across fellow human beings.

I am sure the questions are not going to slowdown now, (only economy is supposed to slowdown) when people are struggling hard to see a glimpse of hope and hear a sound of comfort from others. Lets keep asking questions, i dont think there are much answers around and atleast lets fill the world with questions...

Psychology of social networking sites

Nobody passes a day these days without checking out or without getting an invitation to join a social networking sites, they are the in thing and if you are not a part of these vogue stuff, you will be branded out of touch with the system, and with those net junkies , the peer pressure adds up even more.

If you start digging deep into to the psyche of the social networking site, we can understand our human carving to be associated with a group. This didn't start recently and has been since from our primordial days, man (and women too) started moving in groups for the want to food and safety which eventually led to the birth of villages , cities, countries etc and etc. Being in a group (except if you are a true lion which by probability very low) just adds to your comfort and you feel more courageous if you are among the crowd of like minded people. (Refer single theory , group theory etc or those pranks in your college days).

The key tenet of Internet has been collaborations among a diversified groups and initial days of web was all about consolidating information, it was a good foundation which led to newer interactions with somebody/thing whom you wouldnt have dreamt of meeting . For a society whose constituents had a shrunken vision of life, thanks to the widely accepted materialistic values, this was hardly sufficient and thus started chat .Chat was(is) a transient interaction and it built good (and some bad too) relationships. Evolutionary theory started playing a role and gradually web started moving towards social networking.

I dont have a clue about the exact birth of social networking sites (wikipedia is a different genre ) and am sure our wikipedians would take care of that, there are numerous popular soc networking sites like myspace, facebook, linkedin, orkut, bebo. flickr etc with huge fan following and very niche sites like asmallworld which are by invitation only but all of these exploit our carving for being in a group (not forgetting those emerging virtual world ones). So there is something to choose from whatever may be your want. But the sad fact is apart from being popular and money spinning machines, these sites are becoming more like Walmarts , Carrefours and Tesco's of the world. Pure commodity stuff.

On the otherhand there are set of emerging sites like twitter , librarything, passportstamp really stand out of the crowd for different reasons, twitter is a microblogging site and is a real cool stuff. Librarything is one the most useful site which exists for a purpose , where you can set up a catalog of your books (200 for free membership) in no time with all the information and you can put it in your blog also for a random display of your books, passportstamp is a site where you can keep a track of your travels and am sure if we dig more we could get more.

Whatever said and done, its good to understand that technology helps in getting people closer together where religions (were they supposed to ?) and other great leaders have failed. It would be interesting be see what would be next evolution of these sites, may be we all will dwell in the virtual communities and would be debating with socrates , aristotle in a greek amphitheater sipping our super chilled fosters. Lets keep our eyes open, in the mean time lets socialize more in the real world with real people, there has been no substitute to it.