I usually write about real estate, and specifically the Tallahassee Real Estate Market, so this will be a little bit of a tangent today.

A friend of mine who is a very successful Partner at Deloitte recently invited me to "get connected" at a web site called LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/). This is a social website that allows you to connect to people you know, as well as re-connect to people you have known in the past. So far, how hum, right?

This sight seems to have been built with the concept of "Six Degrees of Separation" in mind, which Wikipedia explains as "Six degrees of separation refers to the idea that, if a person is one step away from each person he or she knows and two steps away from each person who is known by one of the people he or she knows, then everyone is an average of six "steps" away from each person on Earth."

So, if you were able to record everyone you knew on a site, and they in turn recorded everyone they knew, and so on, you could see a graph of the linkages between you and everyone on earth!

So where is the value in this? Imagine you were trying to find a job. You could check your network and find all the people that you know (as well as all the people that they know) in the industry that you were most interested in. You could request help from your network to find a job.

Now, this isn't just for job seekers. Those of us in the real estate industry rely heavily on networks to help people buy and sell real estate. The ability to take this network from the "little black book" to MS Outlook was great, but now we can even take it a step further and develop our network on LinkedIn! The real estate industry is now very much a global marketplace, so it is amazing to me that I can reach out directly to those in the market, around the world, just by using my network.

So, let's take a look at the network that I have started to develop over the past five days. By linking with some of my friends here locally, as well as some of my friends around the world, I started to see my network build. LinkedIn even shows you how many people you have 1 step away, 2 steps away, etc. But best of all, for those people in your network 2 or more steps away, it shows you the people in the middle (which of course would help you make the connection if you needed it).

My Network As Reported This Morning On LinkedIn

A few things to point out. The LinkedIn Network now has over 17 Million People. I have access to 10% of them through my network with three degrees of separation or less. I have only 1 person between me and 20,400 people! That means if I am seeking information on a specific subject, there are 20,400 people that I can parse to find the experts on that subject matter. When I narrow my list, I can reference a person who knows both me and the expert when I contact them. This is good.

You can find me on LinkedIn and let's connect. Tell me you read about it here. So ActiveRainers, Get Linked!

UPDATE March 23, 2008

Check out my stats less than two months after posting this!

My network has grown to over 4.1M people (and note that LinkenIn has grown 20% in the past two months!)