LinkedIn is not a social network.

A thing is defined by it’s major attribute.  While LinkedIn has aspects of a social network, it is actually a social database.

Hey Donato…But they say they are a social network!

In the early days they were.  As the network grew, savvy users realized they needed to grow their networks as large as possible to spread their reach.  In polls done over the last year in live webinars, I’ve asked groups ranging from 200-600 how they use LinkedIn.  Here are the questions and the responses.

1.  I get as many connections as possible and figure out how to contact people directly.

2. I use LinkedIn to as it was meant.  Connect with people through a series of connections.

3.  I don’t use LinkedIn.

69% of people choose option 1. Last year, it was only 50%. The trend is growing and…

LinkedIn is a social database.

That is how the majority of people are using it.  Social database.  Why does this matter?  It is about methodology. First, I will admit, in some cases, an introduction is the only way to get to a high level contact.  Admittedly…this is one way how I use LinkedIn.  However, connecting through a chain of 3 people is too slow. Painful. Sales and especially recruiting cannot work at those speeds.  If they guy at the second place in the chain of connections is on vacation, kiss your placement goodbye.  Another recruiter that goes direct is going to eat your lunch.  Sales is much the same.

LinkedIn promotes bad outreach methods.

Have you ever received a canned message from LinkedIn member that starts with  “Because you are a person I trust…”.   When I am in a particular mood, I will reply to those messages with “Send me $50 please…if you trust me”.   Sometimes this will get a laugh and people will realize how bad their outreach was.  Sometimes, I never hear from them again.  As yet… none of these trusted connections has sent me cash.

Bad outreach is easily cured. Remove the canned invites and force people to actually write a real reason of why they want to connect.  Score the text of the message for uniqueness.  This is not hard to do.  Flag messages that were mass mailed.  Give users the ability to automatically remove any messages sent to more than 1, 5, or 10 people. If I see a message that was sent to 50 people, I would delete it.  I have a personal policy to read all 1:1 messages that are sent with a reason.  I sent this suggestion to Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn CEO at the time and he said “they were working on something like that”.   Based on the amount of unsolicited LinkedIn spam I get…bullshit!

LinkedIn makes money on quantity, not quality

The actions of LinkedIn show that they want to make it as easy as possible for you to connect to as many people as possible.  They know that they have a tremendously valuable social database.   This is good business sense.

LinkedIn: are you reading?  Recently on the focus.com site, my answer about the worst thing on LinkedIn got the most votes.  Everyone hates the canned invites.  Here is the link:  http://www.focus.com/questions/if-you-could-change-1-think-about-linkedin-what-would-it-be/

The quality of LinkedIn will continue to drop over time.  Unless some major changes occur to (1) stop the LinkedIn spam (2) Force quality outreach (3) Give users more control on what is sent to them   …  LinkedIn will experience the exodus.

The LinkedIn Exodus

The future of the web and of technological interaction must be permission based.  Today,  LinkedIn is mob-based-permissions.  Many of the recruiters and sales people I sell to on a regular basis are part of 50+ social networks and groups.  They are being bombarded with outreach, unsolicited from members of those networks.  Eventually, I predict, vendors such as Facebook and LinkedIn will continue to (1) Follow the money (2) Abuse users best interests and then (3) lose those users.   It will be interesting what Google+ ends up looking like.  At some point, users will take back control and all interactions with networks will be on the users terms.  A centralized (maybe mobile) set of permissions that *dictates* to the outside world how the network may interact with the user.  This will happen.

Positioned for permissions.

Which company is going to step up and have some vision?  Give the user total control over what and how often they receive any type of outreach.  It is against LinkedIn’s and Facebook’s short term financial missions.  Maybe Google?  Google does not have to make money on their social network.  That may be one of the key pieces of building a permissions technology.  If money is involved, if the need to sidestep privacy in the name of profit is anywhere in the equation… it won’t work.

Examples of permissions:

Facebook: Block all Apps from Posting on my wall.  I will accept any personal wall post, but darn it, I don’t want to join F*&@ing Branch out.

LinkedIn: Block any messages that are sent to more than one person.  Again: personally I like personalized messages and respond if I can.

LinkedIn Groups: No, because I joined a group, you cannot add me to your widget mailing list.  I must request it and you cannot prompt me.

Google+: Stop notifying me that someone added me to a circle….. score one for Google… they actually just did this!

Social Agents: Yes, my wife’s iPhone can check my iPhone’s calendar and meetings scheduled.

Newsletters: Only accept 1 newsletter per quarter from my financial advisor.

Email: If the person is not in my email history,  mark as low priority (this I already do)

Excessive?  You won’t think that when the RFID label on a bottle of water you just bought sends your iPhone and advertisement.  In a technologically explosive world, permissions that we control will be required to keep our sanity.

A permissions foundation?

What if an independent foundation was created by the major players out there?   Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Apple and …LinkedIn.  Mission: to create a portable technology that is tied to an individual.  It includes all the rules of how the world may interact with that individual.  The “profile” is portable and exclusively owned and controlled by the individual.  Profit could be made by companies that have a better mousetrap for managing those profiles.

Time to get disrupted.

The permissions technology/widget/APP would lead to other interesting side effects.  As it is a few years away, it will coincide with very fast mobile processors.  Good bye Facebook.  Reality: no one trusts Facebook with privacy.  Give people an alternative social network, with permission you absolutely control, that you carry on your hip on your iPhone or Android… why would you want Facebook?

Social Networking evolves:  Mobile Peer to Peer

How will Facebook stop this?  They can’t.  It is inevitable.  Every major technology starts centralized and then moves to distributed as the technology is democratized.   Create a news alert on social networks and violations of user trust.  You will see the trend.  10 years ago…how many people in the world could develop an app for a mobile phone and distribute it in days to millions of people?  Not many.  Today it can be done by an industrious child.

Mobile Peer-Peer social networking will look nearly like Facebook or Google+.  The only difference is that all the data is stored on your iPhone/Android/Device.  New picture of the kids?  … it automatically connects to all your friends devices and uploads the pictures…based on permissions.  Think of it as a group DropBox for pictures, status, check-in’s,  etc.

What needs to happen for Mobile Peer to Peer

Mobile phone processors need to have about a 2X improvement in processor and battery life.  The iPad2 is there today.  In a recent live talk, I demonstrated my iPhone acting as a mobile web server.  It was a bit slow, but the point was understood. Ten years from now, mobile phones will be hosting full blown websites.  Peer-peer social networking will be childsplay  comparatively.

Entrepreneurial opportunity

Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo, Microsoft want to control your data, your friends and record your interactions.  What you do & say, who your friends are, etc.  They want to know, save it and use it.  It’s good business.  Chances are they won’t invest in something that takes control away from them.  This is the perfect recipe for disruption.  Pick the right time, build it and monetize.

Twitter:  idonato
LinkedIn:  http://linkedin.com/in/donatodiorio
Google+:  http://gplus.to/donato
Facebook:  Friends & family only  (my permissions)

Unlimited bandwidth.

Ask any of the iPad user that got one in the early days. Unlimited bandwidth is no longer available on the iPad.   I am one of the lucky users. With a combination of my travel schedule,  high Bandwidth using applications like Netflix and Broadlook’s Profiler, I regularly top 12-15 Gigabytes per month in data transfer.  Data plans today cover 2GB which means I am using 6-8 times the bandwidth that new iPad users get.

I am a bandwidth hog.   I am one of the 2% of people that use the majority of the bandwidth and I’ve got a message for AT&T…I’m keeping my plan…forever.

Why blog about this?  It is a warning for the uninformed.

Guess what?  Very soon you will be a bandwidth hog.  AT&T, Verizon and the other carriers understand this.  It is the nature of technology.  More and more applications, business logic and media rests in the cloud.  Now Apple and Google each want to offer streaming music services.  No longer will you have your iTunes on your desktop, laptop or iPad.  Nope.  They want all your music in the cloud.  Why?   Apple gets a piece of the service fee that you pay AT&T for your iPhone or iPad.  Bandwidth is the new electricity.

This is reminiscent of 2002–2008 when every idiot said that you must make your software offering SaaS (Software as a service).  SaaS is mostly good for service providers since it gives them reoccurring revenue, but it is not always the best solution.  Don’t get me wrong, I am huge believer in SaaS, but it is not a panacea.

Now they (the same smart zealots who want your $$)…are saying that they want all your stuff in the cloud.  Why?  Simple, if you store everything : backups, music, CRM, etc in the cloud then you need bandwidth to access it.

Whose cloud?

At the recent Oracle OpenWorld conference, Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle talked about the cloud NOT being a single set of servers but a flexible appliance.  Thank you Larry!  He gets it. Most don’t.

The Flexible Appliance

What is it?  My iPhone is a flexible appliance.  In a recent talk at the MRI Worldwide conference (The Near and far Future of Recruiting), I demonstrated on stage the advent of the mobile web server.  My laptop connected to a website that was hosted on my iPhone and one person in the front row said “that’s cool!” out loud.  Not the response I was hoping for, but it sunk in to enough  people that had time to think about it.  It inspired some great conversations about the future of recruiting.

I used an iPhone app called ServersMan that makes your iPhone a web server.  Being able to run a web server on a mobile phone has huge implications.

If you want to test the vision of a technical leader ask them this question:

When mobile devices (iPhones, iPads) can act as functional web servers, what does that mean for the technology landscape?”

They should be stunned, they should be wondering, they should be smiling.  If they don’t, then they lack vision.  The advent of the true flexible appliance will bring:

-Massive bandwidth usage.  Via your mobile flexible appliance/personal web server, you will be connected to everything

-Downfall of Facebook.  News to Zuck.  The future social networks will be controlled from the pocket.

-movement from “their” cloud to “my” cloud.

When I have proposed the above, among tech folks, they remind me that some sort of middleware needs to facilitate one mobile web server finding and connecting to another.  This already exists, it is called dynamic DNS and their are a bunch of companies that offer this.   With DynamicDNS, my iPhone web server could very quickly connect to 200 of my friends and update my status on their mobile devices.   No cloud, no Facebook needed.   The only limitation is bandwidth and mobile processing speed.

The above scenario will happen once people realize they don’t want Facebook storing everything about them.  Due to the nature of the beast, they will continue to violate the privacy of their users.  Eventually it will go away.  Don’t get me wrong, I like Facebook.  It gives me a way to connect with grandma and show pictures of the kids.  Facebook may change and become the king of the middle, middleware the ties everything consumer together.  But do you trust them?  I don’t.

It’s all about the middleware.

As I look at SaaS (Software as a Service) and then PaaS (Platform as a Service) combined with the advent of the flexible appliance, I realize that my previous thinking was limited.  In the mobile future,  the mobile is the cloud, the flexible appliance.  For consumer apps like Facebook, people will eventually prefer to keep their personal data in a place they control it.  However, for business applications like CRM and ATS (Applicant Tracking), I see a new class of business.  Middleware as a service (MaaS).

Middleware as a service will balance the load between the cloud and the flexible appliance.  Unlike the limited browser-based applications today, MaaS systems will balance the rich interface and local power of flexible appliance with the security, flexible business logic and data storage in the cloud.  It will be interesting to watch it evolve.

With all this stuff in the works… if you get an unlimited bandwidth package, read the contract and if you can, never give it up.  Providers will offer unlimited bandwidth as a promotion and then like AT&T/Apple, try to get you to downgrade from $30 per month to $25 per month to relinquish your unlimited package.

Did I mention that once you get it, never give it up?

The Apple AppStore has over 100,000 iPhone applications.  Verizon’s Droid is a a few months old and Google just launched the Nexus One.  Microsoft has Windows Mobile and the Palm has the hot new Palm Pre.  The current king of Mobile Business is the Blackberry (RIM),  but it is losing ground fast.  Apple, Microsoft, Google, Palm, Verizon & RIM all going   after the same market and that makes for great headlines.

The Hype

Articles are starting to appear talking about the mobile replacing desktop as a work environment.  For the most part, this is bunk; A symptom of someone looking for a headline, but not thinking.  When I see an interesting article about a controversial topic, I like to first look at the last 2-3 headlines by that author.  If last week they were talking about global warming, the week before about cyber-crime and this week about mobile technology replacing the desktop; I classify them as “reporter”.  Reporter does not equal expert.  While reporters are absolutely essential to get a pulse on minor variations on trends,  I prefer to seek the experts to get a deep understanding of a new technology.   Even better is to immerse yourself and get first-hand experience.  Most of the buzz today is reporter, not expert created.

Definitions

To better understand if/when/why mobile will or will not replace the desktop, definitions are in order:  Desktop refers to the hardware, be it PC, Mac, Linux, either desktop or laptop.  This desktop can be running any form of software including installed, Client-Server, SaaS and browser based.  Mobile is the generally understood concept of a smart-phone like a Blackberry or iPhone.

Mobile vs. Desktop

So will “mobile” business application replace the “desktop”?  Yes and No.  The first Hurtle for Mobile to replace Desktop is CPU & Memory. Over the next decade, mobile form factor devices will have the processor and memory of today’s desktops.  So throw out processing power as a differentiator.  Mobile will catch up.  In fact, most applications today, especially SaaS applications only take up a small amount of CPU and memory on the desktop.

What else constitutes a desktop environment?   Input and output devices.  This is the big one.  I personally have both Mac and PC setups, each with a bunch of big monitors. Besides the large monitors, I use full size keyboards, and a laser mouse.

My Mac & PC workstations

Big ideas need big work spaces.  When I first realized that my iPhone was actually a mobile computer, I tested the limits.  Doing basic operations like reading email works fine.  What about spreadsheets I thought?

Designing a spreadsheet on a mobile device is possible, but very, very inefficient.  I tried it and it’s infuriating.  However, using an already designed spreadsheet on mobile device is realistic.  Reading email; easy.  Writing email; possible, but not as easy as using a full size keyboard.

This is where I had my epiphany that would steer the mobile strategy for Broadlook.

Mobile Technology is an extension of and not a replacement for PC-based business applications.

Why?  Desktop business applications have evolved over the years to take advantage of everything possible.  Case in point, at Broadlook, we switched to the Microsoft Dynamics CRM.  The default setup did not fit our selling model, so we modified Dynamics to fit our business process.  Dynamics is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) environment; a base of CRM functionality which each business can build on.  Our modifications to Dynamics CRM included data points that most companies don’t have access to (unless they are Broadlook customers).  Simply put, the average screen was too small to get all the data on it that we needed.  We could have created a system where everything was accessible in a drill-down fashion (click, click, click).  However, this included too many clicks to be efficient.  I can’t stand having to click 3-4 times to get to data that should be there.  The answer: bigger monitors.  Standard at Broadlook, we now have 24 inch monitors with 1920×1200 resolution.  The things that most people have to click 2-3 extra times to get to their CRM, we have on the first screen.  Simple things like having all the contact info points in the initial search grid.

Broadlook’s Leads Screen in MS Dynamics CRM on a 24 inch monitor.  All info points are available so a sales rep can take action from the first screen.  A typical implementation of SalesForce.com or MS CRM would require you to click 2-3 times to get at all the information on this screen.

As a side note.  These monitors are about $250.  Picking up 50 of these monitors was many many more times cheaper than wasting the time of a sales rep in click-click hell.  In addition developing with the large monitors in mind is much more forgiving than having limited screen real estate and making a design decision that makes 1/2 the people happy and 1/2 ticked off.

How would this business process, which depends on “big hardware” translate to a 4 inch mobile screen?

It won’t.

No way, no how. This is why we won’t see CRM for mobile replacing CRM on the desktop/laptop.  I’ve seen a few mobile “stand-alone” CRM’s on both the sales and recruiting sides.  They are a joke.  An absolute productivity waste.  What works with mobile CRM is when it is used to enhance the desktop experience.  Salesforce has done a good job of it, as have several others.  If your mobile can access your CRM, you can look up a contact, review notes, or line up a few calls for when you are on the road or after hours.  Mobile CRM as a value add to your CRM is an absolute must-have.

What about applications like social networking?  LinkedIN is a good example.  LinkedIN for iPhone is great, I’m looking forward to when LinkedIN or Facebook adds a practical proximity alert to your social network.  That would be something that the desktop or even laptop would not be practical for.   This leads me into the areas that mobile will dominate and why.

For those existing business applications that have evolved on the desktop, mobile will add additional value.  However, for the new frontiers, areas that were birthed in mobile, those will be the areas where mobile can stand alone. It is the same concept which allowed desktop applications to evolve.  You develop to the potential of the environment.  CPU, memory, screen size, input devices, always on (yes/no), network connectivity, battery life.  All of these are the factors that effect Darwinism on both the desktop and mobile device.

Today, most of the successful mobile applications are consumer-based.   As of this writing, none of the top 25 apps in the iPhone AppStore were business apps.  Blackberry pundits:  only 2 of the top 25 for Blackberry were business apps.

So where does this leave us?

• For business applications that evolved on larger form factor systems such as CRM and  Spreadsheets, mobile will be a value-add, but not a replacement.  If someone is promising CRM on your mobile to replace your desktop, run like hell or carry a 12 year old with tiny fingers to type for you everywhere you go.
• New and currently undiscovered business applications that are born and evolve on the mobile will rule the mobile.

2010 is going to be a fantastic year for mobile! I am excited and personally committed to developing on mobile.

Caveats:  (1) When mobile becomes a conduit to work with outside peripherals such as an wall screens and video goggles, then mobile could replace the desktop, however, what is really being accomplished here is emulating the functions of a full form factor desktop & monitor. (2) Seamless voice recognition can get around the problems with small form factor keyboards.  I have not seen voice recognition that is worth it’s salt.  I tell my car “Radio Off” and it says “Please say the name of the street you want to navigate to”.

About 2 years ago, I was a member of  a technology panel at a recruiting conference.  While one of my fellow panelist was finishing answering a question, a cell phone started ringing in the audience. 

On most panels, audience questions naturally get directed to the right person; the panel learns quicky how to use each others expertise and take or defer questions as needed.

I got a question right after the cell phone rang.  The specifics of the question, I do not remember. It was something about how to apply the right mix of technology in a recruitment process (right up my alley).   A cell phone ringing 10 minutes after the event MC asked everyone to turn their phones off perturbed me.

With microphone in hand, I addressed the crowd. ”I’m wondering if the people in the audience today heard the announcement about turning off cell phones. It is quite disturbing for the people on stage.  I guess I don’t understand it.  In the last 30 minutes, I’ve heard 4 cell phones.”  Several people noticibly slinked down in their seats…most likely the offenders.  The crowd was expecting that I was going to chastise them all. 

In reality, I had an idea that I wanted to share with the audience:  The no ring zone.  The topic of the panel was technology in recruitment. 

Here is a general idea of what I said

“We’ve been talking about the right application of technology and when to apply it.  Here is a perfect example.  What if there was a device set at the door of this conference, that when passed by, set cell phones to vibrate only?  Call it a no ring zone.  In high schools around the country, cell phones are being banned.  As a parent, I want my children to be able to reach me and I want to be able to reach them.  What if this same device could set high schools to parent only ring zones?”

I got a good deal of nodding heads, and a few emails from people over the last year about this idea.  I’ve had good conversations about it and it always ends up with our agreement that unless there was some unifying standard behind the cell phones, we wouldn’t be seeing this feature any time soon.

Now that Google has the Android platform, we just need some developer to create a single application, make it free, and market it to speakers, conferences, high schools and parents. Not a bad little market.