One more Bridge to burn… err.. cross.

Last week I got an email invitation to join a professional network site called www.6bridges.com (they have also booked, very thoughtfully, the domain www.sixbridges.com, apparently for people who are less numerically inclined).

But the problem was this: the invitation was not from a friend (as is the norm), but directly from the site. I guess it was sent to the alumni id of my B-school. It kind of pisses me off when people think they can spam the alumni group email id. I thought I would take a look and see what this site is all about. (I could have simply deleted that mail; but that wouldn’t have made a very interesting read on the blog, would it? I mean “I got a spam mail and deleted it” hardly makes the blog readers to sit up and take notice.)

Now, why the name “6 bridges”? The invitation mail mentioned this

The name ‘6bridges' is derived from the fascinating concept of six degrees of separation between people, which the site aims to bridge.

Fair enough. Then I took a look at the site logo, which mentions this

6bridges.com . Building bridges to your future

Now I’m a bit confused. So is it the bridge between people or bridge between one individual and his future? I decided to check out the “About us” page (this is always the first thing I do while reviewing any site). The page mentions the idea of “6 bridges” in following different lines

If the theory about 6 degrees separating people is an interesting one, just what would you call the reality that brings 6 professionals together, whose interests and callings are more degrees apart than 6 !

We decided to call it 6bridges. Bridges that connected the 6 degrees of separation between people, their ideas, interests, paths and helped them to their desired destination.

6 degrees gave us 6 bridges, which in turn gave us these 6 topics.

After reading these lines, I just had 6 words for the founders, viz. “What a truck load of crap”. I wonder if they know what the concept of 6 degrees of separation is all about or just tried to use the number “6” and the word “bridge” in as many different ways as possible.

Interestingly, this site is only limited for alumni of certain pre-determined “elite” colleges (I’ll come back to this point later). My point is, after bragging about bridging the 6 degrees of separation, they have limited their user base to people who are perhaps separated, at the maximum, by two degrees. Anyway, enough bashing for the name, lets move on.

Next page that I checked, since I already knew about their spamming tendency, is the “privacy policy” page. For some reason they have decided to club it together with “terms and conditions” page. Compare this page with that of other professional networking sites; such as Linkedin or even the Indian players like Brijj or Techtribe; and you’ll understand how important “privacy” for 6bridges is.

Now coming back to the idea of limiting the site to only the “elite” colleges. Just out of curiosity, I pulled out my linkedin contact list and selected the top 30 most valuable contacts. Out of those 30, only 7 were from these elite colleges, i.e. more than 75% of my valuable contacts never went to these colleges. 6bridges is clearly designed for the headhunters, not for users like me whose idea of networking is to connect with valuable professionals.

I decided to register with them (with no intention whatsoever of using it in future) and got the confirmation mail after around 14 hours. I guess it’s the time they take to verify whether you actually belong to one of those colleges; a feature which I’m sure would please the headhunters.

When I logged in, I was completely lost. The page was completely cluttered and confusing, just like the home page. Also it seems the site was never tested for firefox users. Some of the dropdown menus, images and page layouts are messed up (I think the page layout problem is there for IE as well). There was no instruction for the new users about how they should start networking with others.

The invitation mail that I received had links to bunch of career related articles, which kind of looked tempting. But once I had registered and viewed those articles, I realized how useless the content was (I should have expected this). The content was mostly copied from several online sources (they were honest enough to provide the link to the original source) and was not organized properly. Some of the articles; such as “Salary Negotiation – Tips and Strategies”, make you wonder who the target audiences are; since any “professional” would find this information useless.

6bridges looks more like a job site, rather than a networking site. But I think they are missing the point. The idea of combining professional networking with head hunting is to identify the passive job seekers and to help get candidates through referrals. I’m not sure how a site designed with keeping only the headhunters in mind and ignoring the networking aspect is ever going to achieve that. As far as I’m concerned, this is one bridge I’m unlikely to cross.