Yesterday, LinkedIn labs announced a new tool to visualize your professional network. InMaps shows all of your first connections, color-coding based on their relationship to each other in the network.
The map is interactive (to you). When you click on one of the nodes in your network, that person’s profile is displayed in the right sidebar and the connections you each share are highlighted. It is easy to see who the influencers and connectors are among the people you know. This has some practical value for better using the LinkedIn service:
You can use those insights to measure your own impact or influence, or create opportunities for someone else. So, you might see two distinct groups that you could introduce to become one. Or, you might leverage one person to connect them to someone else.
Source: Visualize your LinkedIn networkwith InMaps, 1/24/11
My use of LinkedIn has been largely limited to my academic connections made during my time in the Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing. Much of my initial exploration of social networks occurred as I prepared to graduate with a Masters degree in 2006, motivated by a desire to stay connected to those in my class and the two classes before and after mine. This is clearly represented in the dark blue cluster. Since that initial growth, I have mostly responded to connection requests but very rarely seek out new connections. This has led to a second large cluster of Informatics connections acquired during my quest for a Ph.D.
Other groups of note reflect my local Bloomington community (rose colored) and my old high school friends from Woodstock, Illinois (light orange). I also have a couple small clusters based on connections in Silicon Valley (maroon), mostly acquired through my Twitter API book, and my pre-academic job at TicketsNow (light blue). The most interesting color coding is the deep orange, scattered throughout all of the clusters. These people seem to be Indiana University students and faculty who are not Informatics folk.
While this is an interesting reflective exercise—both to consider who I know and how I’ve used LinkedIn—it would be more useful if I could also see the second connections, the people my people know. Understanding the next-step reach of my connections might inspire some expansion into clusters of interest and to know how the people I know are known outside of my network. I’ve never understood why this information isn’t easier to get to on LinkedIn, especially since I can visit anyone’s profile and it suggests a path to connecting to that person.
This service is free, provided your network is large enough to map (at least 50 connections and 75 percent of your profile completed).