Staying connected

There seems to be a flurry of activity on the several sites I am part of. Not sure if it's increased awareness on my part or if the owners of the sites -- LinkedIn, Plaxo, Facebook -- have figured out to if not make the sites more useful, at least promote them better.

Take LinkedIn, for example. Seems everytime I go on there the home page has some very clever teasers. By examining my profile they can suggest people from my past. This is, what I believe, is driving an increase in requests from others. (It's certainly not my personality not my value as a member of their network.)

The problem is I now have profiles on all three sites and it's hard to keep things up to date. This is particularly true between the directory sites, LinkedIn and Plaxo. Although, I notice you can, for a fee, synchronize the two. Nice feature. But I still have LotusNotes at work so I am now dealing with more than one contact list. (The fact that I have LotusNotes is probably more my problem than LinkedIn's or Plaxo's. LotusNotes has such small market share it's a wonder anyone collaborates with them.)

My main beef with LinkedIn is that I don't really use it, other than as a scoreboard to see how many people I have listed. I am up to 66 but there are others in my network above 500. Damn. I've got to get to work. I have also done some mother in law research and seems many people have the same opinion I do. Mark Potts goes a step further and claims the whole thing is a waste of time.

I am not sure it's a complete waste of time but a few thoughts:

One of these models is going to take off. Seems the one that will is the one that connects the others the best. All have realized they need to talk to each other.

I see young people living and breathing by this stuff, particularly on Facebook. I am not crystal clear how this will impact my life but it's impacted others.

I actually like the Plaxo model -- relying on people to update their own contact info. Others think it's an intrusion. I don't agree but realize one must be careful how often you ask for updates. Once a year seems about right.