I was always a little leery of friendster.com and sites like that. I'm married so I wasn't looking for online dating and stuff. And I seemed to be able to schedule my life and meet with friends without needing the help of a "social networking" site.

The other day (after demoing TIBCO's really cool Ajax framework) someone sent me an invite to LinkedIn.com. I ignored it at first, but this guy also sent an invite to a couple co-workers who then sent me new invites.

So I succumbed and joined up. LinkedIn isn't a social networking site, it's a business networking site. I've only been playing around with it for a few days, but it's really interesting. I wish we had this back when I was doing consulting. It would have made finding contracts a lot easier.

It's interesting how many people you end up being linked to. No links to Bill Gates or Torvalds yet, but I'm still hoping. My goal now is to get close to someone who can hire me to google.

LinkedIn is free and everything but I suspect they'll start charging soon for some of the advanced features. I just wish they would get a good graphical representation of the links between contacts. It's sad, but even though I crank out tons of back-end code day in and day out, I'm a sucker for a good graphic. You can never pay too much for a good graphic design.

Next post is about why the bugs I submit to Sun never get fixed (two years and counting).