In the otherwise copycat world of Social Networking, it’s interesting to see LinkedIn do something new:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/20/linkedin-now-for-companies-2/
On Friday morning they will launch company profile pages that partly serve as fact sheets for about 160,000 companies and partly serve to reveal the connections that members have with them.
…bulk of the data shown on these company pages comes from LinkedIn’s own knowledge of people’s careers…
LinkedIn uses this knowledge to display recent hires, related companies, recent promotions, top locations for employees…
…you can see which companies employees usually come from and leave for, as well as which companies the current employees are most connected to…
I’ve always felt that the real ‘moat’ that social networking sites have is the data they hold about their users and the relationships. I suspect this data has been mined so far for generating more targeted advertising, but LinkedIn is the first network I’ve seen that’s exposing this data out in a way that’s interesting for end users:
As an example, here’s what the Microsoft profile shows me about the average Microsoft employee:
and here’s the corresponding page for Google (http://www.techcrunch.com/wp-content/linkedinbiz_shot.png):
Now, who would have thought that the most common career path for Google employees is to join (return to?) Yahoo and Microsoft!