The Sunday Times Social List

Image by HowardLake via FlickrSteve Dale pointed out to me that the Sunday Times started a social 'wealth' index earlier this year. The Social List is a development along the lines of the Rich List.
Well, not quite.
The list takes four of the big online social networks (LinkedIN, Foursquare, Twitter and Facebook) and calculates your 'connectedness' and activity. It expresses the result as an index of 'social worth'. I always thought social worth was what you gave back to your community in the shape of volunteering, charity work and the like.

The list will undoubtedly appeal to the narcissists, but I couldn't help pointing it at my social networks (I belong to 3 of them, but not Foursquare). Surprisingly, out of over 47,000 people registered, I came out 27,344th. I was surprised because I almost never look at my Facebook account and rarely Tweet.

There are some obvious omissions in the social stock that the list looks at. There is no way that prolific bloggers with huge followings (including Steve), and users of other microblog sites, Ning, Flikr etc can add their preferred channels. In my mind, the most significant omission however is Google+. Google Circles was touted as the next big thing in social connectivity, but is notable by it's absence from the Sunday Times Social List.

Network Visualisation and more

I attended a networking event organised by TFPL yesterday. If you know me well, you know I like playing with software tools, and I was intrigued by some tools mentioned by Jemima Gibbons, Author of "Monkeys with Typewriters: Myths & Realities of Social Media at Work".
You may have seen some or all of them before and I am sure there are others out there. I thought I'd have a quick play with some of them.

Linked IN
If you are a LinkedIn user, you might be interested in INmaps which enables you to visualise your network.

Here's mine:

http://inmaps.linkedinlabs.com/share/Phil_Ridout/196065024839027455648601768042894769074

Facebook
I'd not seen friendwheel before which generates images like this:

But another Facebook tool which did the rounds a few months back was Social Graph

Twitter
If you are a Tweeter, then you can understand your 'social capital' on that network by using Peerindex. I'm not a big Twitter user so the results for me are really not worth looking at. But if you are a Twitter user (and care about these things) then it may be worth a look
In the same vein we also have Klout which measures your 'Klout' across several networks.

These tools are all very well but what are the use cases ? When I look at the social graphs generated by InMaps and Social Graph, they don't tell me anything I didn't already know and there's no action I would take as a result of seeing these. But if I were trying to become known as a thought leader or 'influencer' in some field these tools might help me see if I was succeeding and suggest ways of increasing my reach. What would really be interesting is whether there are any similar such tools operating 'within the firewall' and how are they being used.

If you know of any such use cases then please come along to the Business Networking & Collaboration tools Roundtable (KIN Members only) on July 11th