I was recently invited to join Naymz, a professional social networking site like LinkedIn, but with more emphasis on reputation. Going through the initial setup and looking around, several features caught my eye:
Like a growing number of Web 2.0 sites, there’s immediate feedback and incentives to complete your profile and take action. Naymz takes it a step further by labeling each profile field or action button with its point value, which really lets you gauge the return on filling out a long section or disclosing a certain piece of information.
Unfortunately, instant feedback of these score increases isn’t provided; it appears they’re updated in daily batch processing. This alleviates the performance problem of querying multiple tables every time a profile is loaded, and provides some incentive to revisit the site. Busy users may not, though, and the performance hit could be addressed by updating the cached score only when the profile is updated.
Another interesting piece of the scoring is that raw points are translated into a relative score metric compared to other users. This hits close to some participation scoring metrics I pioneered for another social software system, with the same benefit of encouraging continuous participation to maintain rank.
Finally, there’s the focus on reputation management, personal branding, and search engine optimization (SEO). I’m a firm believer that if you don’t manage your online presence, someone else will, so it’s interesting to see this sold as a business service to people who are not SEO geeks. As premium services, they even often Google Ad purchasing and page authoring to push down undesired results. I’m not a fan of the latter, though I suppose Google will be the final arbiter of whether it’s spam or not.
That’s my quick initial take; what do others make of Naymz as a complement or competitor to LinkedIn and other professional social sites?
