Advocate's Studio

I wrote about Visualize.me back a month or so ago and I got my beta invite last night. So, of course, instead of heading off to bed like I should have, I had to play with the new toy. It painlessly and quickly linked up with LinkedIn and, just like magic, a Martha Sperry Career Infographic was born. It is definitely a work in progress – Visualize.me allows you to tweak colors, fonts and backgrounds, which I intend to do, since hot pink is not my color of choice when it comes to a professional presentation. Nonetheless, at least for display purposes, the result below is a pretty fine example of what approximately 2 minutes of effort can yield with this cool new service. My URL is http://beta.vizualize.me/martha. Thanks, Vizualize.me!

Anyone who has spent any time here in the Studio knows I love me a good infographic. When someone offers to combine the visual power of an infographic with my own personal, professional stats and network, I’m all ears and eyes. Visualize.me promises just that: your LinkedIn profile in infographic form. You need do nothing – the application’s powerful coding behind the scenes extracts the information and gussies it up all for you like magic. Visualize.me pulls information about your positions, educational background, interests, recommendations, skills and connections from your profile. It then weights these attributes based on years of experience. The weighted data is what the app uses to create the infographic - your abilities are portrayed relative to your other talents via charts familiar to the infographic design style. The infographic can be customized with a variety of different free and premium themes and templates. The app promises to add the ability to change colors and typefaces, too. Makes me think of those free personal landing pages, like Flavors.me , Doo.id and Zerply. Only infographically-represented.

Don’t get too excited – Vizualize.me isn’t quite open for business just yet, but will be available as a public beta August 1, 2011. Sign up early to get early access and free-of-charge premium features when the private beta launches July 25.

How could I NOT write about this? Hi, my name is Martha. I used to play Tetris. A whole freaking metric ton of Tetris. I used to curse that Microsoft included the habit-forming game right in its operating system. Minesweeper was bad. Tetris was far far worse – the most addictive game I have ever played. But that is all behind me now. Or is it?

Matthew Shoup and Steve Pecko created this dastardly mix of Tetris and LinkedIn. The game, called DropIn, is a great little Java script program that works in your browser. The blocks consist of the profile pictures of your LinkedIn connections. Authorize the app to connect with  your LinkedIn profile, and you are good to go. Just like the classic version, the arrow keys to move and rotate the shapes and then you can slam that puppy to the bottom with your space bar. Just like the classic, you can see the next shape on the right side of the screen.

Sort of like the “building blocks” of your professional networking community. Heh, heh. Couldn’t resist.

Hat tip to Digital Inspiration Blog.

LinkedIn Labs, probably all jovial and such from the success of LinkedIn’s recent IPO, has a new fun tool you can use to visualize your career timeline in a very Memolane sort of way: LinkedIn Connection Timeline. Using semantic information contained with your Profile connections, this little hack creates a visual representation of your connections, your career points and the strength of those connections at a given point in time. Why do it? LinkedIn developer Gordon Koo explains the why of it:

A few months ago, I found myself thinking about my connections and the nature of my LinkedIn network. There was an “aha!” moment where I realized that LinkedIn has a unique characteristic which others lack — it is three-dimensional. The first dimension is the actual connection. The second is the implicit grouping of connections which tie the social graph together. Many social networks have these first two dimensions, but what makes LinkedIn’s network special is its third dimension: time.

Curious as to what your professional life in 3D looks? Check out the tool – it’s live on LinkedIn right now.

What do you do when you want to find out everything you can about a particular company, business, or professional? Well, you can search Google for the business and then visit each site individually and cull the pertinent information. Chances are there will be hits at the top of the results list from Crunchbase, LinkedIn, and Quora.

But … what if you could visit a business web page, click a button, and instantly pull up information from all three of these top business information sources? Well, you can if you use Google Chrome as your browser. Brand new extension Polaris Insights will enable the magic. The CrunchBase column includes  funding information, the LinkedIn column includes your connections within the company, and the Quora column lists some of the Q&A conversations about the company.

Polaris Insights is Chrome only for now, but a Firefox extension appears to be in the works. Great tool for business research and blogging!