10e20 Blog

For those of you who aren’t familiar with LinkedIn, it’s an online social network of with a strong business and professional networking slant. According to their website, it currents consists of more than 10 million experienced professionals from around the world, representing 150 industries. I set up my LinkedIn profile a long time and really never did anything with it. Finally after the last SES show I came home and actually made it complete and started to build out my network (if you’d like to add me - click here for Chris Winfield). So what’s this have to do with MyBlogLog?

Last night I was reading a post by Michael Arrington about how LinkedIn has added a new feature that allows you to see who is visiting your profile. When you log into your personal homepage on the right hand side you will see something like this:

You can then click through to the details:

Since I haven’t been an ardent user of LinkedIn, I never was compelled to upgrade my account to one of the paying packages but if you notice at the bottom - this is a teaser to get me to. If I have an upgraded account, I can see the other 6 people who have viewed my profile recently. For the sake of this post, let’s upgrade the account and see the extra info:

Just like MyBlogLog did on their way to being sold for $10 Million to Yahoo, LinkedIn is hoping that by piquing people’s curiosity and stroking their egos, it will lead to upgraded accounts. For those of you not familiar with MyBlogLog, the company basically started as a tool for bloggers to get stats and other information for their blogs, they then decided to create a cool widget that bloggers could easily add to their websites. If you were logged into your account and you visited a blog with the widget installed, your face would show up on their site. In my opinion, MyBlogLog became huge because it was an ego boost for people - beyond just basic RSS reader numbers, you could confirm that a prominent blogger or someone you respect was actually reading your blog. Further, you could see who is visiting your own profile. Here’s the last 5 people who visited mine (Chris Winfield):

LinkedIn doesn’t give you a picture or even a name most times. They describe this feature as “list of the people who’ve recently viewed your profile. Many times, instead of seeing exactly who viewed your profile, you’ll see anonymous profile characteristics such as industry and title.” Will they go further towards the MyBlogLog model and show you each time, exactly who is viewing your profile as the default? Perhaps. If you’re a LinkedIn user and you don’t feel comfortable with this, there are three Each user can choose between three possible settings that determine what’s shown when they view someone’s profile:

• Show your name and headline
• Only show users my anonymous profile characteristics (default)
• Don’t show users that I’ve viewed their profile

You can change your settings by clicking here (just make sure you are logged in to your account). The more that I see things like this, the more I am reminded as to just how much information can be tracked about our online activities everyday…