Today, we launched the beta version of the O’Reilly Connection, a tech-centric jobs and networking site for developers. The service was originally conceived and developed by Steve Haldane and Scott Yara of Greenplum as a demonstration of what you can do with PostgreSQL. They subsequently contributed to O’Reilly, where it was further developed by Tony Stubblebine, with Nancy Abila driving the bus on everything but the coding, including management sponsorship, design, QA, site metrics, pr and marketing, and much more.
As I said in the press release:
“I’ve been fascinated by the possibilities of social networking, but
frustrated by the need to build up social network databases from scratch
rather than by instrumenting the real social networks that occur in the
course of our daily life. We have an active community at O’Reilly-people
who read and write our books, who attend and speak at our conferences, and
who read and write for the O’Reilly Network. And one of the ‘back
channel’ conversations among all these people is about finding
developers to hire, or to help with projects. Could a social networking
application help us facilitate these conversations? The O’Reilly
Connection is our first stab at answering this question.”
This is still very much a beta site. We’d love your feedback about what works, and what doesn’t. We expect to add quite a few features in the coming weeks, but we needed some users before we could have enough data to start exploring the possibilities!