LinkedIn, the Facebook of Work contacts, has created a great new interactive visualization tool for your network, automatically grouping your contacts into areas by similar contacts and allowing you to browse the connections between them. From Mashable’s description:
InMaps is an insight into who the major connections, bridges and influencers are in your network. People with bigger dots and their names in larger fonts have more connections (and typically more sway) in specific clusters. Perhaps that’s why my friend Neal Sales-Griffin, the former president of Northwestern’s student body, is so prominent in my professional graph.
The image above is my network, which you can view yourself at this shared link. The layout and grouping is done automatically, although you then enter your own titles for the groups.
via LinkedIn InMaps Visualizes Your Entire Business Network.
Hi Randall. InMaps is a really good step on the way to a better understanding of our Personal Networks (I include everyone we know in that!). As you rightly point out, InMaps can only deal with the business network – and actually, only those in our business network that we connect to on LinkedIn. I recently did some research on my Personal Network – and only 11% were connected to me on LI (and 71% of those were weak ties). If you want to find out more on the development of InMaps – check out the video with DJ Patil on my blog. DJ shows you his network – and those of a few others – on large pieces of paper (much clearer than my MacBook screen!). http://wp.me/pYnfH-7f
I love this application showing the links between you and your connections. The image it creates can be interesting if you have been involved in more than one career in your professional life. However, in my case, my professional career has been mainly High Performance Computing. Therefore, my image is really just one big ball of blue HPC twine, with a small thread in orange for some missions work I did in Peru.