Technology: October 2008 Archives

Yesterday LinkedIn launched several profile applications for users based on OpenSocial. What I really like about LinkedIn is that it's not for kids (or kid-like behavior) or MySpace users looking for a new playground.

If you know me, you know I'm not a fan of Facebook, or similarly ubiquitous social networking sites. I don't have any desire to receive "hatching eggs" that turn into baby dinosaurs or bright yellow chicks. I also don't want to post shout-outs to people I already know, simply for the hell of having everyone see what I wrote on someone's "Wall." Unlike Facebook, I see LinkedIn as having a distinct purpose: to grow and solidify your business or career network. And now LinkedIn is offering more tools to help move the site beyond simply a place for amassing contacts and recommendations from colleagues.

With new applications like TripIt, BlogLink, CompanyBuzz, and Amazon Booklist, LinkedIn has given us more ways to strengthen our existing connections, and grow new ones--all with a distinctive business slant. Here's a very quick rundown of my two favorite tools from the release:

With TripIt, I can enter information about my travel plans both past and present and the application uses my itineraries to find similarly travelled individuals, if you will. Plus, it allows your contacts to see where you are at any given time (based on the information you enter; again, a good safeguard against stalkers--just kidding!-- and generally having too much info "out there"). By having all of your info, TripIt makes it easy to see when you and your contacts are in the same city or country for a business meeting or an informal meet-up.

Have a blog like me? Rather than simply linking to it from your LinkedIn profile and hoping people bother to check it out, BlogLink puts your blog posts right on your profile with very little effort.

What I find most annoying about Facebook is the pointlessness of many of the applications. You can add an application like "Cities I've Visited" to your profile, but because Facebook has a very unclear purpose (I know, I know, it's to "make friends," but isn't that rather ambiguous these days?), you're never sure how you should use the tool other than to brag that you've travelled to hundreds of cities to people who bother to even look at that part of your profile. I know there will be lots of people who disagree with me about Facebook, but I guess I just don't see the point of posting all of your personal information on a site without getting too much out of it--other than, perhaps, a hatching egg?

The Official Google Blog reports that they'll finally be helping out fools like me who often hear songs on YouTube videos that they'd love to have on their iTunes playlist, but unfortunately, have no idea the identity of the artists that create them. YouTube users who like a song on a video will now be offered "Click-to-Buy" links which the blog claims will be "unobtrusive."

While I think the "Click-to-Buy" idea is great, I also think it might be helpful to the music industry (and, of course, YouTube) to use music recognition software like Shazam or Midomi to automatically link the music/content for purchase. Many people think Shazam does a better job of recognizing songs overall, according to GigaOm, but I suspect that the debate will soon be eclipsed by a larger issue--the issue of how this technology can continue to remain relevant and become useful to us in generating new sources of revenue through YouTube videos and the like.

How could any of the players in this arena take it to the next level, technologically speaking? As it stands right now, any time a song is in a YouTube video, the content producer must go in and tag their content (in this case, a song). Wouldn't it be easier if the process could be automated so that anything in a YouTube video could be identified by applications such as Shazam or Midomi (or an as-yet-uninvented Google app) and automatically tagged? If the technology is already there, then it might be easier than having content producers "claim" a song in every YouTube video.

Midomi's parent company, Melodis, might be ready to set themselves apart from leader Shazam by being the first innovator in this arena: GigaOm reports that they have raised $7 million in Series B funding. Whatever Melodis is up to with their cash is anyone's guess, but one thing is for sure: innovation is necessary to take this technology to the next level. Of course it goes without saying that Google has the resources to simply build an application like this themselves anyway and integrate it seamlessly into YouTube. Guess we'll have to stay tuned and see how it all plays out.