LinkedIn InMaps Network Visualization Service

LinkedIn has launched a Network Visualization tool which creates an image map of your professional network. The driver is no doubt to drive user activity, thus adview monetization opportunities. Whatever the reason, pretty cool!

Every wonder what your professional network might look like visually laid out? LinkedIn InMaps Network Visualization Service launched by LinkedIn to provide an image map of your LinkedIn network so you can do exactly that. Pretty cool if you are a long time LinkedIn user with an extensive professional network.

You can click the image above to go to a live example LinkedIn InMaps service created landing page. The InMaps service builds an image map of your LinkedIn Network, segmenting your network connections into different color-coded clusters that can be labeled by the InMaps user.

For my LinkedIn Network, which was initially started back in 1994 shortly after LinkedIn launched, there were some obvious visual patterns in InMaps created clusters based on my career path since 1994. Lots of nodes in the blue cluster for the 10 years and 100s of contacts from Telcordia Technologies, lots nodes in the green cluster from my tenure at Burst Media.

The InMaps resulting image map appears to represent a contact’s node and label size proportional to number of connections by that contact. Once a user runs the InMaps network visualization of their LinkedIn network, a landing page is created that can then be shared with contacts using the provided share buttons for Twitter, Facebook, and of course, LinkedIn.

For more information from LinkedIn on their InMaps network visualization service, check out the video by DJ Patel, the chief scientist at LinkedIn.

Thanks to the Mashable for the blog post LinkedIn Launches Tool to Visualize Your Business Network and providing the heads up to this cool tool and the inspiration for this post.