You see the colorful blob over there ===> that looks something like a brain? That's my "InMap" from LinkedIn, and, unfortunately, that's the last one I'm going to get as they've officially quit supporting it as of, well, yesterday. While you can click on that for a larger version, the downloadable one isn't as interesting/useful as the on-line one has been as each of those dots is one of my contacts on LinkedIn, and the web of lines is how they're all connected to each other. What's cool is how the thing self-organizes. I had NO input on this (there was an option to label the colors, but I never bothered), and it's just how the connections played out. That wispy grey area in the top left? Highschool contacts. That red extension towards the middle? Second Life people. That orange clump in the lower left? Folks connected to my old publishing company. And that purple "brain stem"? Those are all Empire Avenue players.
The main green/blue/purple area are marketing, job search, social media, and press contacts (that purple edge to the blue area is almost all Tribune folks). This took nearly 2 hours to generate, largely because, in that main area, "everybody knows everybody", so there are no doubt thousands of connecting lines. Heck, the program even commented "you have a very complex map" and offered to email me when it was done!
I'm guessing that, because of charts like mine, running the Map function was a major resource drain for LinkedIn, and since this didn't seem to have gone beyond a "that's cool!" level of utility (in the outlying areas it IS interesting to see who's connected to who, but in the main groups, you can't really track the individual connections), and so they're pulling the plug on it. I think I posted up an earlier download of this, and figured I'd share it now, as it's the last one coming out.
I wish I could have downloaded the interactive version with all the names on it, but that didn't seem to be an option, so I indulged my OCD and did a few dozen screen grabs of a reasonably zoomed in view of the map, and then cut-and-pasted them into a very large file (54mb) that I'll have for future reference.
Sorry if you see this and get a serious hankering to have one for yourself, since they're shutting it down ... but you might be able to coax yours (assuming you're on LinkedIn) over at http://inmaps.linkedinlabs.com/network
