LinkedIn Needs Trust Weighting

Bill McGonigle — Tue, 06 May 2008 15:38:00 -0400

One problem with LinkedIn is that every contact in your network is treated the same. This could be improved by adding a trust weighting to every contact.

For example, I have a best friend from high school, and some guy I just met at a conference yesterday. I want to give the old buddy a 10 and the new guy a 1, because that relates to how much I can trust them.

But, why?

LinkedIn has great potential for me to find people I need to find. Say I need a designer, an artist, a graphics pipeline optimizer. I can probably search the LinkedIn graph for these kinds of people now, but all I really know about them is how many hops away they are and maybe there are some recommendations.

But with trust weightings, I’d get better answers. I’d much rather hire somebody on a 4-hop 10/10/10/10 path than a 2-hop 1/1 path, for instance.

And, of course, the trusts would be kept secret by LinkedIn, but they’d use them to help you find people.

Any LinkedIn users out there - would you actually be willing to set trust levels on your contacts?

The BFC Computing Weblog: Tag networks

LinkedIn Needs Trust Weighting