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LinkedIn is the social network that’s all business. While Facebook focuses on your personal life (primarily), LinkedIn is all about your professional network.
Now there’s a new startup that’s looking to compete head-to-head with LinkedIn. Commonred.com takes the professional network concept pioneered by LinkedIn, but with an updated interface and some fresh new twists.
Commonred is currently in a private beta (leave a comment below if you’d like an invitation). I’ve been playing with it, and here’s what I like so far:
- The personal board of directors – This is a great concept where you can identify the people who you count on to really help guide your career.
- The prompts for interaction – Commonred does an excellent job of encouraging you to engage with your network on a deeper level, by sending messages, inviting them to meet for lunch, etc. I’m less keen on the boilerplate text, but it’s a start.
- The common threads – Key to Commonred is the “common threads” indicator — a number which shows you how many things you share in common with someone. A common thread might be a school, a place you’ve both lived, or a sport team you follow. But it’s a point of intersection that could provide the grounds for a deeper professional relationship.
It’s still to be seen whether Commonred will take off, but they’ve got some interesting ideas. If you’d like to check it out, leave a comment and I’ll send you an invitation.
Well, it sounds interesting, but since I’m really only on LinkedIn because it’s pretty much “expected” these days, I don’t think I’d really use another even remotely business related social site. For my job – it’s just not needed.
But there are a lot of people who could definitely use a site like this. Especially people in the sales field could find this relieves the need for many of the networking type groups (although I guess they have their place too).
Jeff, keep us up to date on your impressions as it continues to develop!
Thanks for the discussion Jeff. Well as biased as I might be, I’d say that currently LinkedIn is the best solution for helping someone find a job. Login every 6-months, update your profile and get recruited.
But while it’s the de facto professional ‘social’ network, there’s nothing ‘social’ about it. Newsfeed? Questions? Groups? Come on.
In real life people are much more than a resume. We’re the sum of all our experience. Commonred is focused on building community, deep and meaningful professional common threads, and totally uninterested in how many ‘connections’ you have.
Ultimately if you have 5-amazing contacts helping you do anything along the way, that’s 10x better than 500+ vanity connections with people you met for 5-mins at a conference. At least I hope so or we might be wasting a lot of time.
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