Venture Geek

Am I the only person who thinks is almost rude to hide your Contact List from your connections on LinkedIn? I’m not advocating opening it up to the whole world, but if you are going to have someone as a contact, isn’t it just part of the deal that you’ll let them look through the other folks you are connected to in order to, you know, do some possible networking with your friends-of-friends? I actually don’t much care for the “official” means of referring people down the chain in LinkedIn (why spend friend capital on such impersonal introductions?), but the ability to know who is “2-degrees” away and then make a personal request to have a personal introduction seems like the quintessential purpose of even being in LinkedIn in the first place. Though, when I think about my own use of LinkedIn it ends up just being primarily a glorified contact list of folks I want to stay in touch with, so perhaps “quintessential” is a bit strong. If you don’t trust someone to not abuse knowledge of whom you know, why have them as a “contact” in the system anyway? I would have thought it basic social software etiquette.

Tangent: I remember in the early 90s when the Internet was first getting attention with a “mainstream” audience there were all sorts of tutorials about “netiquette” — the idea being that if you were new to the Internet you might not understand how things are done there (here). It seems downright quaint to think of that now — even to think of the Internet as a single place with a single culture is so outdated that it’s hard to imagine it was only a decade ago things were so different (my, how quickly a decade can pass!).

So, if you are reading this and don’t allow your contacts in LinkedIn to see your other contacts, consider changing your settings. Or, consider helping me to better understand…

Keeping up with a blog is tough. If you don’t write almost every day, people start to lose interest. That’s particularly true for a blog that hasn’t even really started yet.

So, you can imagine how upsetting it was when my second post on this blog was lost in the ether by Flock, that fancy browser based on Firefox. One of the nice features of Flock, in theory, is the integated blogging interface, allowing one to create a blog post any time by clicking a button on the toolbar. Sounds great.

Somehow, Flock managed to post only the title of my post, losing the body entirely. It just didn’t make it. And, of course, Flock closes the window after you post, making it impossible to retrieve. But, wait, Flock is apparently able to save posts locally. Well, somehow the folder Flock created to do just that is empty.

The short of it is, instead of reading what was surely brilliant insights into the nature of the universe, you are reading this. And how is a rant about beta software a valuable use of your time? Well, it’s a warning to stay away from the Flock beta if you are in it for the blogging tools….