More on professional networks: Ryze, Viadeo, Plaxo and Naymz

In my last post I selected a few (so-called) online professional networks and reviewed them. Here are some more: some useful, some not. This is not an exhaustive list, as these sites are constantly popping up. However, I will try to guide you through the dross to find the ones that work!

Ryze

This is a business networking site, and its functionality is similar to that of LinkedIn. It’s quite un-sophisticated though, and has only around 300,000 members, most of whom are US based. This site doesn’t seem to be going anywhere: although it’s been around a long time the look and feel are quite boring, and its offering is fairly limited. For these reasons, I won’t be using it.


Viadeo

This is an excellent site (which along with Xing) could prove a viable competitor to LinkedIn, particularly in Europe. It has a very strong presence in France, and acquired a network in Canada last year, bringing its member numbers to 25 million.

It charges fees of around €6 monthly for premium membership. The structure is very simple: users get access to all areas with premium membership, including contacting other members.

In late 2009, the Economist reported: “Last year LinkedIn had struck a deal with Apec, France's best-known professional-recruitment service, to offer search functions to its huge customer base of over 30,000 companies and 500,000 executives. But on November 17th Apec made a new deal with Viadeo, having noted that although LinkedIn could reach executives at France's biggest international companies, it failed to connect enough people in the country's thousands of smaller firms…

In Italy and Japan, LinkedIn is number one even though it has not translated its site into the local language in either place. In China, however, LinkedIn has to compete against the Chinese-language website of Tianji, the country's biggest professional network, which is owned by Viadeo.”


Plaxo

Plaxo sells itself as being an address book in the cloud. It has been around for some time: the company itself says it has 40 million members, although recent press reports quote 20 million. It launched ‘Plaxo Pulse’ (a true online networking site) but following its lack of success, Pulse has been rebranded and toned down to ‘Stream’ – which shows web-wide activity of a user’s contacts. Its functionality is mostly aimed at working with existing contacts and so it’s not useful for networking.


Naymz

Naymz is a little different from other networking sites in that it offers tools focussed on reputation, personal branding and identify verification. There is emphasis on the truth of the information on a profile, and members receive points on a reputation score dashboard.

Having said all that, Naymz has a slightly dubious reputation for being simply a scraper site that pulls names from other sites. Naymz appear to be completely US based, so will be of limited value to European-side networkers, especially at a basic fee of €25 monthly.