I.T. Link Wants to Be LinkedIn for the I.T. Crowd

I.T. Link is a 2 month old social network created by Ziff Davis Media specifically for the I.T. professional. After reading the post on Mashable, I was mildy enthusiastic about this new Linked In wannabe. When you sign up at I.T. Link, you indicate your position and industry, your reasons for joining, and what types of networking opportunities you would be interested in. When others join matching your interests, you can be automatically emailed. Good thing I turned that off since I was interested in meeting everyone. What kind of social network would encourage you to limit your associations right off the bat? Hmmm…

Other community offerings at I.T. Link include discussion boards and…gasp…chat rooms. That’s so 1997. What else is available? I wonder, and poke around some more. Well, it seems you can start a blog there. Because hey, you’re an I.T. professional who has yet to discover blogging and certainly would not, say, ALREADY have a blog, maybe one with a feed you would want to post or syndicate there.

The coolest feature the site offers is the People Map, which matches your interests to others and displays them as little people positioned on a circular map with you in the center; those standing closest to you are better matches to your information and interests. This would have been even cooler if the People Map actually remembered my interests that I had taken the time to fill out when joining the community. Instead, inexplicably, every category was selected via the checkboxes located in the adjustable settings box on the right side of the map, forcing me to de-select items so that only my interests showed on the map.

Fun, for about two minutes, but then it was time to move on. I think I’ll stick with LinkedIn for now and CNet’s TechRepublic, both being sites that "get" community 100 times better than I.T. Link does. How disappointing.