Hoover’s, Inc. Tries to Compete With LinkedIn

As a writer I am always trying to find more and better ways to connect with potential clients and existing ones. MySpace and FaceBook offer connections better suited to friendships and activities than to business, so I tend to use sites like LinkedIn for the professional side of social networking. Hoover's, Inc. today announced its own network, Hoover's Connect, that is supposed to offer professionals a new way to connect.

This has been in beta development for a year, powered by a partnership between Hoover's, Inc and Visible Path (recently acquired by Hoover's, Inc). I had high hopes for the official launch. Hoover's is, after all, a trusted institution for business information, and I'd hoped they'd bring more of their considerable knowledge and resources to bear on their social networking side in a new and innovative way.

Unfortunately, they did not use their existing knowledge stores to enhance the business connections platform, which means that they are directly competing with sites like LinkedIn, offering no more knowledge about a company than you can already find without their help. They missed their chance to have an edge. Not only that, they have chosen to remain firmly inside the limited corporate box when it comes to site functionality.

By thinking like a regular big business, and not like a Web 2.0 start up, they have chosen to limit themselves to Microsoft products for some of their site widgets. This means that unless you use Internet Explorer or Microsoft Outlook, you have no way to automatically upload your contact lists. This is a major, major strike against them in my book. Why would you restrict yourself and your growth to a company like Microsoft that continues to refuse to be W3C compliant?

In addition to restricting automatic uploads, they have made it next to impossible to add people to your network on their site. In order to add someone, you must first find them in their own network, then add them by email address. The trouble is that this system fails much of the time - often the system tells you the contact's last name has unexpected characters (an extra space, perhaps, an underscore or hyphen) which you can do nothing about, and which prevents you from adding them.

Also, because it only allows one email address be associated with their name, if you know them from one blog or site, and they signed up to Hoover's Connect under another, you again can not add them. Some of the people have Visual Path set up, which is supposed to make connecting easier, but I found myself having to try several times to get those connections as the site had several page errors using the Visual Path system.

From the way the site looks to the trouble I had actually using it (on a MacBook running Leopard and FireFox latest versions), I was generally displeased with my entire experience. I don't think Hoover's Connect was ready to launch. the appearance of the site comes across as old and stodgy and not visually interesting. Not only that, the navigation is not intuitive in any way. It is a struggle to find and add contacts, and the system is biased toward Microsoft products instead of being Web 2.0 friendly. Hoover's, Inc. may be calling this a social network, but they make it very hard to be social. I think they missed the mark on this one.