Social Networking

I'm just sitting in the departure lounge at Dublin Airport, waiting for my flight back to London Gatwick; I've been doing the BI Masterclass over at Oracle's offices at Eastpoint over the last couple of days, and I'm running it again tomorrow and Friday at Oracle's offices in Thames Valley Park. Even though it's my birthday (bid for sympathy...) I'm spending it working and travelling, but at least I'm going via BA rather than Ryanair so it's not going to be the usual miserable journey I usually end up experiencing.

One or two of you might have got an email from me, via Linkedin, over the last few days with an offer to "link up" using their "social networking" tool. I'm normally a bit leery of these sorts of schemes - they're usually a way to sell you something, or get a list of names for recruiters - but quite a few people in the Oracle world are part of the scheme, with the prompting in fact coming from an invite I got last week from Steve Karam.

So far, although it's nice when someone accepts your invite, I'm still trying to work out what use you can put the service to. All the people I've "Linked in" with I could just email anyway, although I guess now I can search their list of contacts and ask them to "make an introduction" - but I guess I'd normally just email them directly anyway - but then I am a bit forward like that, anyway. One nice thing I have noticed is when someone "recommmends" you - after I sent out the invites, Dan Vlamis from Vlamis Software Solutions, and Jean-Pierre Djicks from OWB Product Management, wrote recommendations for me, which was very nice of them. If you're interested, here's my profile here (which needs a bit of sprucing up, to be honest, and it's out of date now)

I was wondering though - apart from hustling for work, or looking for a new job/looking for job candidates - what do you use LinkedIn for? Am I missing something? Or is the sending out of invites just a nice chance to get back in contact with people, perhaps get talking with someone you've not corresponded with for a while? I'll have to have a play around with it, and see just what this friend-of-a-friend, social networking thing is all about. Also, if I didn't include you in the invites, but you've got an account (I mainly sent them out to other consutants, I sort of expected a bit of a ribbing from the DBAs...) and you want to link up, just send me an invite. You never know, we might actually find a use for it.