one more reason to use email on the cloud (aka Gmail)

OK this is a quick one… I’ve just spend 1hr fixing my LinkedIn profile. One very nice feature of this service, is that it can import your contacts from Gmail, do a string match against its database, and if some of your email contacts are already in LinkedIn, send them requests to join your professional network.

I just realize now, how easy it would have been if I had all the emails from my company going to Gmail: I would be able to easily leverage the proffesional network tracking capabilities of the LinkedIn service, keeping connected with all the people I exchanged email for business, without any effort from my part (and besides I wouldn’t have to deal with Outlook madness daily, rather do some Gmail Fu).

All these might seem self-intuitive, but look behind the lines: as many of the people I’ve met for the past couple of years (both online and in real space) we have been saying to each other, when data stay closed behind the firewalls, they are siloed and they cannot gain in value by being connected.

So put everything on the biggest existing cloud out there, the internet, and let it be connected by the duct tape called Web 2.0. A devil’s advocate might bring up the issue of privacy, which is a significant one: for example many of my email contacts might not want their address being parsed by LinkedIn, because we don’t know what LinkedIn does with them…

Now I am eager to see if I can evade IT, and fwd all my email to my Gmail account….

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