With all the furor around teens and MySpace (www.myspace.com), it can be lost that there are quite a few "networking" sites on the Internet that are full of positive buzz, including some aimed at grown-ups and businesspeople.
First, we ought to set our terms straight. Social networking sites, such as MySpace and Friendster and others, are designed really just to connect people together like virtual Dixie cups and string.
Some, like MySpace, are aimed at the social scene. Others, like the cool 30Boxes (www.30boxes.com), are designed to let you put your entire social calendar online so your friends can "book" you for events.
But businesses and businesspeople have been watching sites like these with great interest and adapting them for their needs. For example, 30Boxes doesn't have to be used for social events; it can be used to reserve a conference room, plan a retreat or whatever.
Some sites are being launched strictly aimed at businesspeople.
My favorite of these is "LinkedIn" (www.linkedin.com), which has more than 5 million registered users already. This free site lets you create a business profile of yourself, sort of an online resume, which you then link to people you know. It sort of is played like the Kevin Bacon 6 Degrees game. If you know someone well and want to endorse their work, you can do so on their profile. The more people you link to, the larger your potential network becomes.
This is very interesting for salespeople and headhunters, who are always looking for new talent, and also very interesting for human resources folks. Many people like to "pick off" employees at certain companies and sometimes don't know anyone there or can't get the right way in. With LinkedIn you can search your network of people who know people you know and get an introduction that way.
The site is free for basic users, though power users can pay a monthly fee for the ability to search across larger portions of the network or make introductions directly.
Many jobs are now posted on the site, many exclusive to LinkedIn, the theory being that the person on the site probably is employed and probably has some folks on there to vouch for them.
Another site called JigSaw (www.jigsaw.com) treats contacts like commodities, giving people points for finding new contacts and getting them added to the system and penalizing you points if you add bad data. Membership costs most people about $25 a month, although the site can be free if you add enough contacts per month. (That site strikes me as a lot of work, but I am not in that kind of business, I guess. It's clearly aimed at sales and less at one-to-one relationships.)
What's happening with JigSaw is people are being compensated, basically, for uploading their company Rolodex into a Web site, which strikes me as a fundamentally bad idea. It's not quite as easy to make quick cash doing it as some of the blogs would have you believe ("rat out your friends for $1!!") because you'd have to upload a couple of hundred contacts to get started. But again, it's creepy because, at least with LinkedIn, people are hooking themselves up and offering only the information they want out there about themselves.
With JigSaw you are just a data-entry clerk with someone else's information.
WEEKLY WEB WONDER: One of the better tech blogs out there is TechCrunch. Check it out at www.techcrunch.com.
James Derk is co-owner of CyberDads, a computer repair company, and a computer columnist for Scripps Howard News Service. His e-mail address is jim@cyberdads.com.