Linkedin doesn't really do it for me, I 'get it' as an idea but I just find it's whole web experience confusing and I have no idea what they have spent all their money on (dot com bubble anyone?).

Still, I do appreciate the value of a recommendations - and, better still, I value recommendations from people I know, like and trust. This feature is at the very heart of linkedin.

So, my mind got wandering to "how could we use Twitter for such recommendations?"

In a sense we already do, I'll ask my followers advice etc but I was thinking there might be a bigger solution out there...

For instance, if we tweeted something like:
"I #recommend @XXXXX as a superb accountancy based in Newport, South Wales. Speak to Diane."

Now it's not rocket science to create a Twitter app (see note 1) which will monitor twitter and store such #recommend tweets (note 2).

The website could then show a page for all Twitter accounts which have been recommended - and what the recommendations were.

Now where I think it gets sexy is:
1) You could search for recommendations
2) You could filter recommendations and ONLY see recommendations made by people who are within "n" degrees of separation from you.

To me recommendations made this way are very powerful: eg I put a lot of time/effort into my @joel_hughes Twitter account - it has nearly 20K tweets. If I recommend someone it is validated by me & my account - not something done lightly.

I'm not proposing that we start doing this, I'm simply improvising with the concept of using Twitter for recommendations. My gut feel is that any such app needs to record criticism as well as recommendations.

Update:

Please read a great guest blog response to this...

Notes:
1) Really it's not. I wrote http://tweko.com

2) The hashtag could be anything of course, just needs to be a convention.
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device