Hitwise pulled out one piece of data analysis that is really interesting. They put the traffic numbers of MySpace and Back to School / Education together. The table shows how web, especially social web, is changing our life, our kids’ life so much:

myspace-versus-education

Tags: data, myspace, social media, social network, web analytics

LinkedIn is really doing interesting things based on their existing platform and the database they have. They just launched a new feature “Companies” in Beta this week.

I was shocked when I took a look at what they have under each company’s profile. Some features are the result of partnering with BusinessWeek. Overall, each company has one branding page within LinkedIn, not built by the company itself, but by its employees data (no matter if/how the company wants to build this brand page)…Hoho, this is getting really interesting

Some data/features related to individual users:

1. there is a company introduction section, pulling in BusinessWeek’s existing company profiling data. No big deal.
2. you can see other employees’ names within your current company and “Popular Profiles”. No big deal either.
3. what’s interesting is you can see “New Hires” & “Recent Promotions & Changes”. What? Yeah, I can’t believe this! What a bold and smart idea of user generated content!
4. “Open Jobs” is a good information source for job applicants who are interested in one particular company. No one needs to go to other job sites any more.

Some data/features related to companies:

1. what’s the most interesting one is “Career Path” - Before & After! That’s really a smart way of pulling out & analyzing job profile data! It’s definitely helpful to see the trend for each company on this.
2. “Employee are most connected to” is another interesting one.
3. “company locations” section is another way of letting the employees tell you how the jobs are distributed.
4. Some other data includes “common jobs, top schools” and “median age”, “Male x%” & “Female x%”.

This is definitely another example of showing how powerful user generated content is. Employees define what the company is! I think soon they might have salary info too, like Glassdoor.com (one company rating & review sites with salary poll).

Last two things that they are doing in the Beta version of this “Company” feature are:

1. they do allow you to Remove your profile from certain sections, like “New Hires” or “Recent Promotions” (Good for them to have this option!).
2. they proactively ask for feedback if you see anything incorrect in each company profile.

I believe that there are probably a lot more interesting things to play with LinkedIn database, and other social networking sites too! Data is the biggest asset. Good job, LinkedIn.

Tags: data, linkedin, social network, social networking