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.

Around a month back BusinessWeek ran this article on how Google was jumping into the fray of grading how influential people are — very similar to their page rank system for grading web sites.  Seth Godin’s new book Triiibes has a very similar message. Tribes are powerful and you should strive to be the leader of a tribe to help the spread of ideas and build a community.

This is taking the “Karma” system used by crowdsourced news aggregators sites like Digg and Reddit to the next level.  Below is an interesting presentation by Digg founder Kevin Rose that I found on SlideShare that shows they are planning to put more emphasis on the “Followers” phenomenan.  The future of sharing and discovery is weighing heavily on how influential an individual is.

If you ask me I think Twitter has a leg up on all of them as the follower system is native to their system and a lot of the most influential people have already congregated around Twitter and started building their following. Plus Twitter is just too cool.  If you would like to discuss this further feel free to follow me on Twitter @prashantkaw.