Today, two more connections were added to my LinkedIn contacts list, and the number of contacts went up from 998 to 1000, the 1000th contact is my IBM Haifa Research Lab colleague, Ran Ettinger. LinkedIn is the social network in which I have most contacts, I also have twitter account followed by 236, and Facebook account with 96 friends, there are also some more social networks I am registered in somehow, but I am not active in any of them.
Among the 1000 members of the contact list 331 are (or have been at some point) IBM employees, the two other high-tech companies with most contacts are: Google (16) and Microsoft (10), There are also some contacts from my second universe, the academic world: Technion (29) followed by Tel-Aviv University (8).
Some are friends and classmates from high-school, Out of the 1000, 423 live in Israel, 131 in the Greater NY area, 69 from the SFO Bay area, and 46 from the UK, and then from many other countries in all continents. I am also registered in about 40 LinkedIn groups -- from Temple University alumni, to the Haifa high-tech community, and of course all event processing related groups, and many others.
I have never asked anybody to recommend me on LinkedIn, one person did in response to the fact that I've recommended him. I have recommended six persons at their request, but never knew whether it is effective.
That's enough statistics for today.
I noticed that the number of my linked-in contacts has grown again to a nice number 888, my wife said that if I'll hit 999 she'll join linked-in and be my 1000 connection, so have some way to go.
Anyway - one interesting insight from my recent visit in the USA is the way to react to event, or why proactive behavior needs to be smart. I was driving in a road and there has been a sign notifying: traffic jam in a certain bridge, it is advised to use alternative roads, there was still around 30 minutes to drive to that bridge, and a couple of alternative roads.
My own calculation was that most of the traffic heading to that direction will use alternative roads, and that there is enough time for the traffic jam to be cleared, assuming that there will be very little additional traffic, this of course was a gamble, but since I was not in a hurry to catch a flight, I decided to take this gamble, ignored the advice and drove straight to the bridge with the traffic jam, and surprise...surprise... the bridge was totally clear without any delay, indeed the traffic jam was cleared and there has been very little traffic heading in that direction. Of course, if many other drivers would have taken the same strategy it would not have worked (like the prisoner's dilemma in game theory). The lesson it that notifying about event may not yield the best result, maybe alternative road became jammed. In this case the global optimization was to direct certain percentage of the traffic to each alternative route and leave certain percentage directed to the original route. If we are looking from the point of view of individual driver who does not care about the others, this driver still needs to take into account the other's reaction in order to determine strategy. I guess that these kind of considerations are also getting into trading decisions.
Today I noticed that the number of my LinkedIn contacts is now a round number 0f 600, unfortunately two of these 600, Klaus Ditrtich and Shlomit Zak have passed away, but their LinkedIn records are still alive, I hope that the rest of the 598 are alive and well. I was introduced to LinkedIn 3 or 4 years ago, when I received a LinkedIn invitation from Mark Palmer, who was my first contact, and accumulated the rest of the links over the years. Part of them invited me, and part of them were invited by me, I have there classmates from high school, colleagues from all places I worked in, students I taught or supervised, some friends, and of course, the members of the event processing community. LinkedIn was my first social network, currently I even don't know exactly how many social networks I am member of, but LinkedIn is the only one that I am active in. So I'll take this opportunity to say a few things about how event processing can become part of social network platforms.
There is a lot of buzz recently about Twitter events, which is also one of the Web 2.0 family, but I'll take the LinkedIn example now, since it has some structure, which creates various event types. While there is applications that attempt to use Twitter events to get information about the stock market, in social networks the events are about individuals; some of the interesting event patterns that may be obtained about individuals:
- A person got more than 3 recommendation during the last week -- probably looking for a job now, this is an information that can be of interest for various people, such as head hunters, or enterprises seeking for employees.
- A certain amount of contacts joined a certain group -- may be an indication about a group of interest
- LinkedIn has microblogging of 14o characters like Twitter -- various things can be obtained from this microblogging.
- Postings that people make on groups may indicate something about a person.
- Level of activity in groups may also indicate something about that group.
Many other possibilities can be thought on; I foresee that event processing will be embedded in social network platforms, and maybe will be the basis of abilities to offer paid services. Some social networks send me an Email every time that somebody looks at my profile, and offer me to know the identity of this person, if I'll become a paying member, I have never tempted to do it, however, maybe the use of event processing will provide such services that will be worth paying for, but I guess that most people expect to get these kind of services for free... Can be a good exercise for students, to build such a service. That's all for today, almost midnight...
