Dopass.com

A close friend of mine asked me what Linkedin was, today. I told him that it was basically a friendster for professionals. A way to build and maintain a business network of contacts. A sort of "6 degrees of the industry" style list...

When you sign up, the site keeps your contact information on file. This information is available to people, but only in a very restricted way. You can get a vCard with contact info for any person you add to your network directly (who is related to you by 1 degree), but you can't get this information for anyone else, even those who are related to your personal contacts (related to you by 2 degrees). However, through their feature called 'introductions' and 'inMail' you can still get in contact with your 2nd degree contacts, you just do it through the site and your own contacts. So, let's say I'm an associate of Billy (he is a 1st degree contact), but I really want to send a message to Mandy and Grimm. I can ask Billy to pass my message and my request to be introduced to Mandy and Grimm along. He can review what I'm asking of them and decide for himself if it's worth bothering his contacts with. If he agrees, the system passes the message down to Mandy and Grimm, along with any comments Billy might have added himself.

For higher level business this is probably a really useful tool. I can imagine that it is an incredible tool for finding new business opportunities. Hell, I'd love to use it that way, but I'm not that kind of industry participant, you know? I don't wheel or deal, I just make games. The thing is, a lot of the people in this industry do, and they use this site to do it, or at least seem to. There are, literally, thousands of members of the industry have already signed up and hundreds more sign up every month.

I have to admit though, I don't use it for business. I've been contemplating using it for playing a game. Something a lot like Pokemon, or TAG... Or maybe big game hunting. The idea is to cultivate as impressive a contact list as you can. There are two possible ways to win, one is to cultivate a large list (think of the plainsmen of the old west "hunting" buffalo), but the other is to cultivate an influential list (put on your pith helmet, get your local guide, your trusty porter and your elephant gun). Ultimately it's more play than game, there aren't really any set rules or anything and the win condition is ill-defined ("the cooler contact list wins"), but I noticed as I was building my personal list that's a sort of sick collectors glee in getting your contact list all linked in. I think it'd be even more enjoyable played competitively.

- Snipehunter