This morning I received an email from LinkedIn asking me to fill in a customer feedback survey. If you haven’t heard of LinkedIn, you’ve probably been living in a cave. A nice quiet hermetically sealed marketing-free cave. LinkedIn is a social networking tool that connects work colleagues and old classmates for business networking purposes. I signed up a few years back and have been using it — grudgingly, reluctantly — since then. The survey reminded me why.

In theory, LinkedIn should be a really valuable tool, the kind one would willingly use on a regular basis. In practice, LinkedIn and most of its brethren have a fatal design flaw: they fail to request sufficient permission before opening you up to inbound communications and sending outbound communications on your behalf. And that violates customer trust.

Seth Godin evangelizes a related concept called “Permission Marketing”. In short, if you want to market to somebody, first request their permission with some sort of intellectual bait: discounts, samples, etc. If you get their permission (i.e. they accept your bait), game on: you can begin a dialog, and that dialog will be welcome. If you don’t get permission, leave them alone, because your message will fall on deaf or even unfriendly ears.

Where LinkedIn goes wrong is by over-reaching at signup time. By default, it automatically broadcasts any profile updates you make to everyone in your network. By default, it makes it easy for people you don’t know or barely know to send you email. And by default, it makes your social network visible to everyone. Yuck. It’s a good way to scare off your friends and colleagues, who implicitly trust you to guard their privacy and protect them from spam.

I’ve tweaked my LinkedIn settings to tone down the noise and protect privacy, and I may use it a while longer. After all, staying connected is work, and LinkedIn does makes it easier to track email address changes. But I really only use it as a glorified address tracker. For anything beyond that I revert to my trusty old standby: email.

Hmm… which makes me wonder, when will someone do a good job connecting permission requests with email? That would be a useful tool.

I recently came across two interesting tools for synchronizing data across multiple machines.

Sean sent me mail about Google Browser Sync, a tool which continuously synchronizes Firefox browser settings – bookmarks, history, cookies, open tabs and windows, etc. – across your computers. I haven’t signed up yet but it sounds pretty handy to me, especially synchronization of open tabs and windows.

I anticipate one usability problem: according to the FAQ, Browser Sync only allows you to be logged in to one browser at a time. This would be an annoyance for me as I generally have two computers running. Nevertheless, I’ll give it a whirl and find out for myself.

Funding this sort of work is strategically smart for Google. It helps make Firefox a stronger companion to Google’s web services, it takes market share from Internet Explorer and Microsoft’s web services, and it gives Google more information about the universe of URLs out there: new ideas on URLs to index, plus ability to analyze URL visit patterns and correlations of visits between particular URLs. (E.g. if you visit http://Foo.com a lot, you might want to visit http://Bar.com too.) Google’s privacy policy makes it clear this sort of analysis of your private data is explicitly permitted.

The other sync tool is FolderShare, which Microsoft acquired in November 2005. (Time-honored acquisition plan: build a product that plugs a large and painful hole in a bigger company’s strategy. Windows has needed file synch forever.)

I’ve been rolling my own synch solution for years using a hodge-podge of batch scripts, xxcopy, and static IP addresses, and I must say that FolderShare makes it a heck of a lot easier. I’ve been using FolderShare the past few weeks to synchronize pictures and project documents across a few computers, and I plan to try using it to share pictures with family and friends. I particularly like that it works on the Mac. I can imagine setting this up with not-so-tech-savvy family members so that their computer always picks up your latest photographs automatically.

FolderShare does have a few limits: it cannot transfer files larger than 2GB; there is a maximum of 10,000 files per library; and you may create a maximum of 10 libraries (library = file folder). The 10k/10 libraries limit is probably built in so that Microsoft can offer a “professional” version targeted at businesses and heavy end users. I guess I fall into the latter category: my music library is way bigger than 10,000 files, and I’d love an easy way to sync up my laptop so that my tunes are always with me.

Parting thought: it’s interesting to see more and more services which ask end users to deeply trust companies with their personal data: email, documents, search history, browsing habits. Building that sort of trust is hard. In many ways trustworthiness is the most expensive asset to build up, and the most defensible from a competitive standpoint. As a long-term sustainable competitive advantage, trust beats technology any day.