Tribe and LinkedIn

I just signed up for Tribe and LinkedIn. My initial impression is that I am very, very impressed. Both are amazingly slick applications. They both have a similar goal, but approach it entirely differently. From what I’ve seen so far, Tribe groups people by geographical areas and by “Tribes”. When I visited the site, it told me I was from Los Angeles (and it’s correct). And the site that I browse is in the losangeles.tribe.net subdomain. One major drawback: huge graphical advertisements.

I’m even more impressed by LinkedIn. I imported my Gmail contact list, which has just over 2,000 emails. Out of those, 65 were already members of LinkedIn. And I was able to find this out in just a couple minutes. Their upload system is superb. And Gmail’s contact export feature is perfect. It has a Gmail .csv format and an Outlook one; since LinkedIn says they can import Outlook-exported lists, I chose that option. It worked flawlessly. It’s amazing!

It’s free (paid upgrade options available) and the only ads I’ve seen are Google text ads. What’s better is that all the pages are secure (https) and they seem to take privacy very seriously. On top of that, the design is slick and fast. The only thing I haven’t liked about the profiles feature is that it wants me to add a second job for the experience section; I don’t know if I really have that much experience to speak of. I’ll probably enter my work at Alpha Escrow and Grace Christian School.