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LinkedIn is one of my favorite networking sites. I use FaceBook and Twitter as well but so far when it comes to professional networking, LinkedIn is the center of my Universe. There’s been a lot of angst with LinkedIn lately and LinkedIn vs. FaceBook comparisons (and I have some strong opinions about that) but I’m going to save that for another post.

Let’s face it. The future of the web pages is to make them more like note books. You need to be able to annotate pages, take notes, mark them up. That was the Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision of the web — to make it read/write. Most sites on the web are read only but blogs comments, product/merchandise reviews (such as on Amazon.com), social news aggregators such as Digg or Reddit are now read/write.

LinkedIn’s latest read /write feature (that I noticed!) is the ability to capture notes on the profile page for each contact in your network. Your online rollerdex just became more useful. No more switching back and forth between Word or Outlook or your hard copy notes. Live in LinkedIn, email, call, take notes and network away — beautiful!

Over time all these personal notes will behave like tags. LinkedIn’s search engine could use the information behind the scenes to make their search more semantic. If 50 of my contacts have the word marketing in their notes about me, that should help make LinkedIn’s search results for the keyword marketing more relevant. Read/write web helps make it a semantic web!

Now I’m not just happy with taking notes. At some point I’d like to capture all my touch points with my contacts one place. So that means I will need a private wall-to-wall feature like we have in FaceBook to capture online conversations I want to have with my contacts, or access to all the InMail emails passed between me and a particular contact over time.

It doesn’t stop there. Once the LinkedIn API opens up a little more I’d like to pull in conversations I’ve had with my contacts in other media such as FaceBook, Twitter, Gmail/Ymail. Might be useful to see if my contact has Digged or Stumbled my blog articles that I’m pulling into my LinkedIn profile. Some progress on LinkedIn’s part but they’ve still got a ways to go.