@Glenn I totally agree. The fusion of job board + social means that we inherently need to capture (or recapture) that trust factor. A social community isn’t a community if people can’t be transparent enough because of a lack of trust. That is why we’re trying to bring real physical communities online instead of creating new ones just for the heck of it. (Ex. working with universities, existing professional groups, etc)

Why would someone want to join such networks, and how can one trust that one will connect with other legitimate people?

In the real world, people are incredibly scared of strangers. It used to not be that way. Yes, Networking worked because you knew people around your block, in your schools, churches and offices. People were willing to talk to you on the subway not thinking you were going to assault them.

Nowadays, you may have 5,000 friends on Facebook, and you don’t even know your next-door neighbor even if you live in an apartment complex of 500 units with 1 tenant each. Similar things happen with people on LinkedIn, including many who abandoned their profile and only created one because everybody else was doing it. They didn’t build up the industry contacts they wanted; if anything, technology made rejection even more rampant.

If you can get the technology to restore the trust that’s missing throughout society, you’ll have a winning product. Otherwise, this product like many others will have initial excitement at first, followed by tremendous disappointment when the contacts that could mean something don’t materialize.