LinkedIn showed off a new addition to its Lab site today called the LinkedIn Connection Timeline. It’s a very fun way to remember people you used to work with throughout the years – and see where they are now. Built internally by LinkedIn’s Gordon Koo, the visualization does a good job illustrating the tip of the iceberg of what structured, social data can provide when accessed programmatically.
And it’s fun. It brings to mind the app Memolane and makes me wish someone would build something like this for Twitter or Facebook. Take the list of people I’m connected to there and show me when on a timeline I connected with the ones I have interacted with the most. Play me a song that my Last.fm profile says I used to listen to a lot, don’t listen to anymore and that has a high-emotion rhythm to it and you’ve got a mashup that could bring lots of people near tears. (You just know that Facebook will offer something like this someday.) Always more emotionally reserved, LinkedIn at least offers a fun retrospective of past co-workers.
