published about 1 month ago (29.11.2009 20:16)
Expect superdragon success!
You have been warned ;-)
published 2 months ago (07.11.2009 11:18)
400 XING contacts - time for housekeeping
I just added my 400th contact on XING. If you had told me this 3,5 years ago, I’d have called you crazy and explained how I detest this “superficial networking” stuff! I used email to stay in contact with my closer friends online. And I continue to do
so today.
But my attitude towards “networking” has changed, for many reasons. I’ve become a more open person in general, I’ve seen the inside of a social networking company (it isn’t all evil, on the contrary!), I understood networking isn’t about arbitrarily adding people to a list, and I add only people I have met in person as a contact.
Still, 400 people is way more than any person can have real relations with. Theory agrees: according to Dunbar, ~150 is the cognitive limit for the number of people you can maintain stable social relationships with. So XING generally is a way to stay in touch with people I have met, and find interesting. Some of these are closer, but some of them I don’t have a “dunbaresque” stable social relationship with.
After some time you realize you’re not in touch with some contacts anymore. Someone you met at a conference three years ago. Someone who doesn’t use XING actively. Someone you had added out of politeness. Someone you invited, but now doesn’t use XING. Someone you haven’t developed a personal relation with since meeting them. Time puts everything in relation. It’s time for housekeeping! Reviewing who you consider part of your network, and who not. XING could make this much easier. This would add pure user value—save me time now when cleaning up the list, save me time in the future by having less, but the right people
to handle.
Some XING features that would make my network more transparent
- show me my contacts sorted by the number of interactions I have had with them. Interactions measured by profile visits forth and back, emails forth and back, group discussion threads we both participated in, and so on. This “interaction strength” is a metric that would be useful in many areas of the platform.
- show me a list of all my contacts by the date I added them. Let me group by month or year. This is my XING networking history. Along with the picture, I would see the comment and tags I assigned at the time.
- allow much faster and powerful tagging. This could be done with an interface similar to the “invite contacts to event” feature: AJAX-search one or more contacts, then drag and drop to a tag. Some experimentation and testing would be required to get the interface right, but the current one can be improved a lot.
- de-clutter and improve the contacts start page. Among many other things, lots of whitespace in the wrong place, and those 5 fat action icons really aren’t the most important feature.
- auto-suggest inactive people, whom I should “ping” again to have them use the platform, or remove from my contacts.
These would be powerful features for any social network, and they can be built technically. So go ahead and make XING the best social networking tool out there, and everything else will follow.
P.S.: I found the “business card” view (and a 24” monitor) to be helpful for the housekeeping process – down to 392 contacts :-)