I recently discovered InMaps, an app that visualizes your LinkedIn network. It was launched in January 2011. Here is a peek at my LinkedIn network visualized using InMaps:
Xiaoxiao's LinkedIn Network
To get your InMap you need to go to http://inmaps.linkedinlabs.com/ and follow the instructions. You can play with the features it provides described in their video.
It visualizes a user’s network by clustering people that are connected to the user. Each cluster is colored with a unique color. I was kind of excited when it is generating my graph but I was super disappointed that it does not label the clusters! It asks the users to click on each node on the graph, find the similarity of people in the same cluster by themselves, and then label them manually.
it asks the user to label the clusters
It was not a hard work for me since I only have about 80 connections and I do not have that many professional experiences (which results in 8 clusters already). However, what would a user with 1,000 connections do if she is asked to label her tons of clusters manually? It would be really nice to have those clusters labelled automatically. I don’t think it is that hard to label the clusters in this task. I think just leverage the metadata of ‘current position’ and/or ‘experience’ of each person would provide a pretty good outcome. At least that is how I labeled my map above.
Since Social Network and clustering relates to my interests and research, I played around with it for a while. Here are my thoughts:
Good things about it:
The map is cool and fun to look at at first glance. You get to know the distribution of your professional network and how the people in it relate to each other.
Oh, and the colors are cute.
Things that are not that good:
The website is slow, the clustering is not that accurate, it does not label the clusters even though they have all the information that they need, and the ‘interactive’ features they provide are useless to me.
Overall, I think it is cool to look at but I really hope that they would provide cluster labeling in the map and then I will go try to play with it again 
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