Lori Wizdo VP Business Development at Kamoon contacted me about an earlier post on Expertise Management software November 19th. She's been looking into profession networking tools out there like Ryze, Linked-in and Spoke. She comments "I am very skeptical about the concept that people will be willing to broker introductions through more than one 'degree of separation'". This does question the claim that such sites give you an advantage when building networks, beyond an initial chat-up line of "I see we both know X". More than one degree away and it hardly seems worth mentioning (e.g. "Hey, what a coincidence: we've both seen a Kevin Bacon movie").
Lori goes on to say that we will start to see the same patterns of protecting relationship capital that we've seen around intellectual capital. Oddly, I see this most in people in corporate environments contemplating self-employment, whereas I know several actual consultants that put a lot of effort into opening up their network (Mick Cope probably being the best example, to the extent that he recently published a book on networking)

Lori agreed to let me quote her if I added that that Kamoon was just as worthy of mention as Askme & Sopheon("Any warm, approbative comments about Kamoon are both wise and welcome."). So I did.