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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
A fast-growing business networking site riles some members by -- gasp! -- laying claim to their intellectual property.
Oct 2, 2002 | For a refugee from the dot-com boom, skimming through the member pages on Ryze, a 1-year-old business networking site, is like a do-it-yourself VH1 "Behind The Music" special on the golden boys of 1999. Remember Jason McCabe Calacanis, the brash editor in chief of "Silicon Alley Reporter"? His page reveals that here in the NASDAQ-1200 days of October 2002, he's still keeping the start-up faith, as the editor and CEO of the rebranded Reporter, now called "Venture Reporter."
And Calacanis' page links to his friends, more big names from those dot-com days, like Andrew Beebe, the former CEO of BigStep, and Scott Heiferman, former CEO of itraffic. It's like a "Where are they now?" for the blue button-down set.
"You end up connecting with a bunch of people who you'd lost touch with," says Jo Ann Mandinach, a search-engine consultant in Palo Alto, who says that she's gotten a couple of job interviews by reconnecting on Ryze. "You see networks of friends of friends, which is fascinating."
"It's six degrees done right," says Andrew Kraft, a sales and marketing consultant in Neshanic Station, N.J., who says he's gotten "several thousand dollars" of business from the hour a day that he spends networking on the site.
The connection gimmick is simple. Members link to their friends who are also among the system's members. Paging through their profiles is like being able to peek into an acquaintance's or even a total stranger's contact database; it's a kind of Web voyeurism for professionals.
New members fill out a template of basic information about themselves: what they do, where they've worked, where they went to school and what they do for fun. Depending on how much you pay a month -- from nothing to $10 -- you can conduct increasingly elaborate searches, trolling for all Austin-based members who are into biking or all CFOs working in New York. Members form online "tribes" based on their shared interests, and even throw off-line events to mix it up face-to-face.
At first glance, Ryze looks like an example of old-school bootstrap, do-it-yourself Internet community emerging from the dot-com junk heap. But as is the case with so many virally growing communities, the members don't always have the same ideas as the founders about how the site should be run. And they particularly didn't like the idea that Ryze might claim as its own property every personal bit of information that the members posted on their Ryze Web pages.
