Silicon Valley Company Demographics

LinkedIn, the social network mostly inhabited by technology professionals, now offers a great feature that allows you to explore various features of the linked in crowd such as company affiliations, age, and years at a company.

This led Louis Gray to create this excellent graph:


Most interesting to me was the very low tenure time at Google, though this may reflect a large number of new hires rather than people leaving the company. However even established titans like Microsoft and Apple appear to have something of a revolving door where people are jumping and climbing aboard other big ships at a surprising pace.

Data Portability: LinkedIn Allows You To Export Your Data

Big storm this week in the blogosphere as Robert Scoble's Facebook account was temporarily suspended for breaking the site's terms of service. He was using a new tool from Plaxo Pulse that was extracting and matching Plaxo and Facebook users. As Robert said: "I wanted to get all my contacts into my Microsoft Outlook address book and hook them up with the Plaxo system, which 1,800 of my friends are already on." Scoble was eventually reinstated but the debate about data portability now rages on (see also DataPortability.org).

A few minutes ago, I discovered that LinkedIn now allows you to export your data in various formats (.CSV and .VCF). I don't know how long they've been offering this feature (not long I suspect) but it's an extremely smart move to position themselves as the definite business-oriented social network. Bravo!