Okay, I'm sold. Yes, LinkedIn has a slicker interface and *way* more people, but OpenBC has just a few extra features that I really, really like.

• Wants / Haves. *Totally* cool. I do this in real life, and the connections you can bring out are amazing. Just last night, for example – seven people, and I can think of good connections for every single one of them. You know what would be the killerest? A summary view of people's wants/haves, optionally sortable by update date. I want an RSS feed of people's updates so that I can keep all those things in mind all the time. Any service that makes it easier for me to proactively create value for other people totally rocks, and it would be good to make it easier for people to browse through my contacts and make those connections themselves. 'cause face it – job descriptions don't say much, and they don't talk about what we want.
• Pictures. Great for reminding other people what I look like. ;) If I could just convince everyone else…
• Private memos. I can easily do that with my personal contact management database, but OpenBC makes it convenient for other people to keep private datestamped notes.
• Tagging. Again, something I can do with my personal contact management database, but not everyone can be so lucky – and OpenBC's tagging + events = cool.
• Groups. I got into OpenBC because of the Greater IBM Initiative. They rock.
• Events. I wonder if I can use this for my parties. You can use tags to invite people to events! Whee. =)
• And they blog. Plus points.

I might even consider paying for the service, which again is quite a
vote considering my grad-student budget. =) It's not that expensive,
though. I just have to figure out how to create enough value.

Sign up and connect. OpenBC has free basic memberships, and you have a
month of premium membership to try it out. I like it a lot. You should
definitely try OpenBC, particularly if you're a Connector in the
Tipping Point sense of the word.

Sign up for OpenBC, then add me as a contact!