Coalitions are being formed. PR spins are created trying to set the public opinion. The one you voted for yesterday will most likely disappoint you tomorrow. And no one asks the people (users) what really bothers them.

I wonder whether political/strategic advisors were also hired to run those campaigns.

photo credit: mattyfacex

“Fox estimates that more than 17 million users have installed the service”. Is there a reason they did not report the number of active users? Is it related to the fact that the product is a generation behind the competition and supports only text conversations, without the ability to do video/audio calls or file sharing?

Forget everything you know about digital photography because here comes Microsoft Photosynth.  

Jason sent me this video and it blew me away. It was presented earlier this year at the TED conference and it’s one of the most impressive visualization technologies that I have seen for a long time.

One of the features I liked most is the ability to see where pictures where taken and seamlessly change the point of view to be as you were standing where the photographer was. Then seamlessly tilt, zoom in or out  or continue to change point of views. The speed this is done is extraordinary considering it can run on a browser installed on a standard PC.

It’s a great example of how social data from people’s collective visual memory (photos) can be linked together to make something that is greater than the sum of its part.

I think that after you will play with it you will find it even more impressive than the video.

I was kind of surprised to see this in the middle of a working day (to be more accurate 6:05PM Pacific).

I am glad I am not a sales guy who needs another sale to reach his Q2 goals…it would be kind of hard to find now the name of a potential client.

Update: It is taking a little longer than expected.

Technorati Tags: LinkedIn

Too bad both environments still disallow a great utility such as Snap Shots to be added to users pages.

• Premium Featured Members
• Who’s Viewed My Profile (full story here)

Both features have been around for a long time on Online Dating sites and serve as baits for non-paying members to buy premium memberships. I think this is a smart move that will probably have strong impact on the number of new premium members.

Now all LinkedIn has to do is add the ability to upload photos and potentially an Instant Message and become the elite online dating site for professionals.

LinkedIn also came out recently with better ways to find people who are not necessarily in your connection list. On the search results page, just above the list of names, a new section was added with suggested searches:

• Current employees of a company
• Execs at a company will list all Partners, Chiefs, VPs, and Directors in a company. I am sure that personal financial advisers & life insurance agents would love this new tool.
• “Similar Searches” is very interesting. I am still not clear on the relevance algo and how they come up with those suggestions (search routes of the masses?), but the results can certainly help someone who is interested in finding leads into companies who operate in the same category/industry.

Today I discovered that LinkedIn completely redid the “My Connection” page and improved the usability of the browse functionality significantly.

The new features include:

• A scroll bar – it’s just amazing how a basic & trivial design/interaction element can improve usability and ‘speed to satisfaction’ so dramatically
• Rolodex style tabs with first letters to quickly jump to a particular location within the list
• Advanced filtering options ( Ajax based) such as “by location”, “by industry”, and the very cool “show only contacts with new connections”

I find this to be a major improvement following the revamp of the internal introductions system and very well done.

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