My biggest gripe with LinkedIn is that recently, I made the fatal mistake of letting it look at my Gmail contacts. Getting suggestions for contacts who are already using LinkedIn was the intention but they invited anyone who had ever mailed me!
Up until that point, my contact list was limited to people that I personally knew and could recommend. Now, months later, I am still getting successful "contact accepted" replies from people that I barely know. I.e everyone who ever contributed to any mailing list that I was ever subscribed to.
I even got replies from people asking why I contacted them. I have no idea how many people remain to accept my invitation or even who they are.
What a disaster. It has changed for me, an early user of the site, what was a useful database of the people I know, to now some random connection of strangers.
The worst part is the link to connect to Gmail still appears and I'm sure that it doesn't clearly indicate what it's intention is. So, if you have connected with an email provider in the past be wary of allowing it to connect again.
And yes, if you let any site connect to your personal data, expect the worst outcome...
This same issue happened to me, including the unsolicited LinkedIn contact invitations.
Suffice to say that it is extremely embarrassing to not only send "connect requests" to people I barely (or don't at all) know, but also to people whom I am actively avoiding due to issues in real life.
I had to go through, check all my pending invitations, and rescind them. Not sure if that really helps, though, since then if they were to click "accept," it would simply say "no invitation to connect."
>My biggest gripe with LinkedIn is that recently, I made the fatal mistake of letting it look at my Gmail contacts. Getting suggestions for contacts who are already using LinkedIn was the intention but they invited anyone who had ever mailed me!
I sold a guy a couch on Craigslist in 2005 or 2006, and he must've uploaded his Gmail contacts to LinkedIn not too long afterward. I only know this because for the last six years or so, the "People You May Know" feature on LinkedIn has kept trying to get me to add him as an e-friend.
I haven't heard that. I just assume that there are enough people out there that I've conversed with that have uploaded their own contact list to LinkedIn to find connections.
Gmail has/had that behavior where anyone you email ends up getting created as a contact, and in the early days it seemed a lot more aggressive as to when it would auto-add someone to the list. So there are a lot of people who have spurious entries in their contact lists.
I know it wasn't worth the time to me to clean the list, up until I bought an Android phone in 2010. So I had six years worth of auto-added contacts, going back to when I first got a gmail invite.
I have repeatedly authorized LinkedIn to look at my contacts and this has NEVER happened. I would bet money that you clicked through a series of screens too fast and didn't realize you were inviting everyone, even though it was clearly stated. That said, it still sucks, and I sympathize. The UX should ideally make it near impossible for anyone to ever accidentally spam every person they ever e-mailed.
On the flip side though, their "people you may know" feature is the best I have ever seen. Once you hook up Gmail once, it repeatedly checks it for new contacts, and thus always presents very relevant recommendations for who you might want to connect with whenever you are on the site. It's extremely frictionless.
This happened to me several years ago. I'm appalled they still do this! It's the main reason I deleted my account. For what it is worth, I've never once regretted deleting it.
Have you tried seeing if those auto-invites are in your invite outbox [1]? You might be able to cancel them. Then again maybe not, I've never used the contact integration feature.
> I made the fatal mistake of letting it look at my Gmail contacts.
It still surprises me how many otherwise clued up people regularly do this sort of thing (it doesn't surprise me that the inexperienced masses do, but people who have some technical and/or business experience behind them should know enough to be more automatically cynical).
Far too many people are quiet happy to hand access to their accounts to third parties despite all the past occasions when this has turned out to have been a bad idea. Heck, you'll probably find that it is a direct violation of your terms of service with the email provider: many have clauses stipulating that you will not share your authentication credentials or otherwise allow 3rd party access under pain of account cancellation.
The other one I don't get is letting apps like facebook exist on a device that contains all your contacts without any control to stop them accessing said contacts. It isn't just that they can use them for behaviour that I consider spammy, there have been occasions where apps have corrupt a significant number of people's contacts list (like when facebook "accidentally" replaced many contacts email details with new "facebook" addresses, much to the irritation of those affected). I know people who get up in arms about the slightest hint of someone being interested in their personal details, who are happy to let any old developer/distributor of some free game or other such have full access to everything on their phones and don't see the cognitive disconnect they are experiencing.
The Facebook app is a tricky example, as it's the only piece of software capable of generating two-step authentication tokens for Facebook.
I've wondered for a while whether that was done as a strategic move specifically to pressure the "clued up" demographic into installing the app. It certainly worked on me.
Same here. After closing my account I was still receiving reminders of invites I got. I had to use a web form to ask them to stop sending me emails. It was quite disturbing to see how hard they tried to cling on my data.
I get two or three of those emails a year because of people who can't really 'work' linked in. So I just flag them all as spam, because that's what they basically are.
I am honestly questioning the utility of LinkedIn in general. It seems to be a sink for recruiter messages when people don't know how to otherwise contact me. I know when someone is hiring bioinformatics developers locally, because within an hour I get LinkedIn messages from six different recruiters who are all trying to pitch the exact same job.
I am not sure how it could be useful in a job search scenario. I don't perceive it as any less annoying to send someone a cold-email just because they are a FOAF on LinkedIn. Am I wrong on this?
I've been on there for 8 years and have accumulated a ton of connections, but I've been tempted to just delete the account. I have avoided doing it though because I have this idea that if someone Googled me and found no LinkedIn profile, they'd think I don't care about my career.
It's a pretty useful tool if you are in a role where you network for a living - sales, marketing, etc. Or if you are actively are looking for a job and aren't in highly specialized niche with a talent shortage.
How could it be useful in a job search scenario? Let's say you want to work at X company and you have a friend, or a friend of a friend who works there. You ask them to refer you into their company, and since companies typically will favor internal referrals, you are more likely to get hired.
A large percentage of jobs are filled without ever even being posted online, so for most people networking is their best bet at landing a new job.
Unless its entirely unwieldy and you get tons and tons of emails from friends of friends who are hounding you all the time, then its pretty much common courtesy to help someone out who asks you for help on LinkedIn or otherwise.
Being contacted by recruiters all the time is another story, but thats kind of the trade off you make when you sign up for a free professional networking tool.
Don't want to deal with recruiters contacting you but still want to keep your LinkedIn account? Let people know you don't respond to messages on your profile and unsubscribe from emails or create an email filter. Or even just filter out emails from the word "recruiter" & LinkedIn and that will probably catch most of it.
I boycott them with the idea that I don't want any single company to become any sort of de facto resume & hiring service, which they already try to bill themselves as. Ostensibly, if you use their service, you don't need a resume or a list of references -- it's all right there!
I also have grave reservations about giving so much of my personal info (job, job history, colleagues, etc.) to a for-profit entity that has every motivation to capitalize on that data while having few reasons not to.
This stems back from a few years ago when they automatically created an account for me based on information that a 3rd party had provided. I don't know if they still do that, but it told me all I needed to know about them.
What drives me crazy about LinkedIn is that Google isn't going after it with Google+. If Google had a "Resume upload" feature, it would slaughter LinkedIn, by allowing various circles of interest, friends, etc to cohabitate with the work stuff. You don't have to worry about sharing with your boss....
I like the technologists at LinkedIn, but I fucking hate the product. It's bullshit. The "Communities" are nothing but recruiter spam, I have people who have never worked with me in particular fields voting me up in these areas (if you have never worked with me on a project involving web dev, why would you upvote me for that skill)....
LinkedIn never rethought the resume. They just took it and put it online with Facebook clone features.
I've been on LinkedIn for a while, without engaging with it that much. In the early days, if someone sent you an invite to connect, there was an option "I don't know this person," with the implication that they would be somehow censured for spamming someone they didn't know.
That option is long gone, but I don't know when it disappeared. Does anyone know when this happened? If anything, that's a sign of when it jumped the proverbial shark.
It's still there, but I think the flow has changed a little bit. You can either Accept or Ignore an invite. If you press Ignore, you're messaged with, "Invitation ignored and archived. More options: I Don't Know [name] or Report as Spam."
The thing I hate most about LinkedIn right now (apart from spamming me) is their new system of friends endorsing your skills. I just got an email this morning saying a friend endorsed my skills in Python. This guy played water polo with me in college, why would he be in any position to endorse my programming skills, and why was he asked to endorse me?
Endorsements have lost all meaning whatsoever. 3 people have endorsed me for OS X for some reason even though I don't have it listed in my skills. I've never owned an Apple product in my life except for an iPhone so my skills with OS X are average at best.
My boyfriend's dad, who is not technical whatsoever, endorsed me for git. I'm pretty sure he just saw the word git and thought, "Hehe, she's a git!"
I think the problem too is that LinkedIn offers people the path of least resistance to endorse people. Occasionally I'll see a message at the top of my profile saying, "Endorse X for Y & Z" and a button to approve it. I'm sure more times than not, people just approve endorsements without giving it a second thought.
Then you're using it wrong. Your connections on LinkedIn should only be colleagues, former colleagues, or people who can potentially advance your career. If her boyfriend's dad was Charles Bronson, that would be a meaningful connection.
The point of Linkedin is leveraging extended networks. It isn't a collection pen for people you think you can use at some point in the future. The dad likely has professionals in his network who have professionals in their network who have ... and so on, all of whom you can connect with through the dad. It would be really dumb to _not_ take advantage of that.
I'm not using it wrong, but it seems that everyone else is, and LinkedIn's more than happy to encourage that usage in the interest of a larger, more interact-y userbase.
Are you telling me that you only get "meaningful" add requests? My friends don't often bother (the feeling is mutual), but the more desperate acquaintances seem to seek me out nonstop.
No, I don't only get meaningful requests. From a ratio perspective, I probably get 1 meaningful request for every 10 non-meaningful requests.
I'm probably in the minority when it comes to how I use the network, but I've also found that I get a lot less noise from it than most people. I can't say if these two factors are correlated at all, but it stands to reason that they would be.
Some people (undefined process) are given an endorsed skill (eg. Python). They can now endorse anyone in their network for python. But they cannot endorse anyone who claims a skill in 'goat herding'.
Now they have meaning as you can only endorse someone for a skill you have also been endorsed for.
My former boss had added 'Oracle' as a skill. I didn't know until LinkedIn asked me to endorse it. He's not even a technical guy, so I've no idea why he had added it but he's actually been endorsed for it by other business owners.
I believe LinkedIn automatically define these skills by crawling for keywords in your profile. I've never added a skills section yet every now and then I get emails stating I've been endorsed for a specific skill.
I believe users can also suggest them? I've got a couple on my LinkedIn profile that I didn't add, and weren't there earlier but I got a notification I was endorsed for that skill anyway.
I've had former colleagues offended that I did not endorse them for skills (that I had not witnessed them using, though I knew they used them at that company.)
I'm swimming in endorsements from people who aren't qualified to do so. I've told this story on here before, but my co-worker was endorsed by one of our colleagues for something he never set as a skill to begin with; it was just some random acronym she thought "sounded technical!"
They really need to figure that business out. Even a simple, "How do you know this person?" would suffice, allowing people to determine the weight of that endorsement on the relationship we have.
Couldnt agree more, this is the current biggest pain of linkedin...
...or perhaps the recruiters sending email such as "I see you have worked with purely with linux and mysql, how about you applying for this 100% microsoft-stack company as a sharepoint/exchange professional." That might not be linkedins fault the recruiters seems stupid, but it should be in linkedins interest to not annoy me with such crap.
I got so sick of meaningless skill endorsements that I decided to delete all the skills from my profile. I posted an update that I did this, and one of my former coworkers replied, "Now I want to endorse you for honesty."
I'm a recruiter, but I hate LinkedIn. In some ways, that's a gross exaggeration because LinkedIn does one thing very, very well: it standardizes people's work experience and puts it all in one place. Once you get used to reading LinkedIn profiles you can get the context you need about a person very, very quickly. This is great.
The rest of it sucks. In particular, LinkedIn Recruiter (the module that lets you see pretty much anyone, no matter how many degrees of separation exist between you and them and lets you send some number of InMails per month) is a giant spam factory. Its design encourages impersonal spams by making it super easy to send exactly the same InMail to large volumes of people. If I'm a recruiter, I can search for everyone who attended MIT and now works at, say, Oracle very easily, and then do the moral equivalent of throwing a bunch of spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. Ugh.
Does it--in any way--feel creepy or unethical to be able to see those kind of connections? As though you're a spectator able to traverse anyone's real life in far more detail than others.
What are the clever, resourceful, and truly evil recruiters doing? I guess the amateur ones can filter by universities and organizations, but surely there's a more efficient way to wade through the swamp of linkedin?
I guess I don't see being clever and resourceful synonymous with being evil. I don't know what the other guys are doing, but I try to use LinkedIn only as a reference (e.g. "where is this person working now, and how long have they been there?", "what kind of stuff has this person worked on historically?")
I try to look at blogs, GitHub, dribbble, HN posts, tweets, Quora submissions, and whatever else I can to try to get some idea of what the person in question is interested in and good at. At the end of the day, I'm trying to surface smart people. Then I try to figure out whether I can offer said smart people interesting work that's in line with what they seem to be passionate about.
What I really hate is the incentive structure that drives a lot of the bad behavior people associate with recruiters. At the heart of the matter, the incentive is economic, and LinkedIn's features are just a function of that.
However, that doesn't make me like it or want to use it.
Can you please elaborate how specifically the "design" encourages impersonal spams? Wouldn't it be in the Recruiter's best interest not to do that? That seems like the difference between a good recruiter and a bad one.
It depends on what the recruiter's goals are. If you're trying to build a brand and establish longterm relationships with people, then, yes, spamming the world is not in your interest. If you're working for an agency, have a quota, and are doing your best to stay above board and not get fired, then spamming the world is in your interest.
The design makes it easy to contact multiple people at once with seemingly personalized messages. In particular, I can specify the type of greeting and a template, and LinkedIn will fill in the person's name etc.
LinkedIn has become the equivalent of spray and pray for job seeking. This article hits the nail on the head. They are more worried about monitizing >5 people who have viewed my profile than truly allowing me to connect with other professionals. I would love to see more dialog options. Groups ala G+ to partition personal info. There is so much more linkedin can be and they fall flat.
While you can bemoan feature creep all you want, the truth is that its hard to remove features one they are in (see http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html). On the other hand having a specialized tool for a common task is really handy. I like these specialized apps, (though I can't comment on LinkedIn's in particular).
Why is it so hard to remove features? Because user complains? Reading Antifragile; there is this idea that evolution works via negativa. We should applaud to any removal of dead parts, even Google Reader, yes.
Well, LinkedIn has been great for me and allowed me to land an awesome job recently. However, I babysit my linkedin account. I check it daily, update my profile with links people would find of interest, reply to all recruiters, comment on stories in the news section. Yeah, I'm pretty engaged in LinkedIn. I don't have facebook, so maybe I use it as a replacement....
Linkedin is a Facebook for recruiter spam. The article raises some valid points, you can't advertise you're looking for a new job because your boss will see or if not, one of your colleagues will and they'll most likely report you to get brownie points with the boss or even take your job.
Half of my connections are recruiters, I get daily emails offering me Wordpress development and SEO services (even though I am a front-end developer and can do that stuff myself), people add me I've never met before who don't even live in the same country as me. Linkedin is a giant mess, it's kind of like the professional equivalent of Myspace circa 2007 when that scantily clad girl wanting to add you was some low-life in a basement trying to spam affiliate links at you, only that scantily clad girl is a guy in a suit trying to get a recruiting commission from spamming your inbox.
Don't get me started on the skill endorsements feature. I get tonnes of emails everyday saying "Joe X has endorsed you for Java" even though Joe knows nothing about Java nor do I. People are endorsing me for skills that I don't even posses or have, what a joke.
Want to network? Get someone's business card and their phone number, store it into your phone and don't rely on a website comprised of spam to build up a network.
Have I offended someone giving my two-cents here? I thought the general consensus is that Linkedin has become a spam wasteland evident by language and tone used in the article. I don't understand the downvote here.
Small bit of syntax feedback - should be "the Facebook to LinkedIn's MySpace". Sorry, just a pet peeve of mine, since so many people word it like you in a way that is obvious to understand but doesn't technically make any sense.
Great. Another one of those dismissal comments as the first in the thread. Let's see:
"Linkedin is a Facebook for recruiter spam. The article raises some valid points, you can't advertise you're looking for a new job because your boss will see or if not, one of your colleagues will and they'll most likely report you to get brownie points with the boss or even take your job."
- You don't need to advertise that you are looking for a new job on LinkedIn. You can always passively look. Are your employers reading your inbox too? If that's the case, maybe you should look elsewhere.
"Half of my connections are recruiters, I get daily emails offering me Wordpress development and SEO services (even though I am a front-end developer and can do that stuff myself), people add me I've never met before who don't even live in the same country as me. Linkedin is a giant mess, it's kind of like the professional equivalent of Myspace circa 2007 when that scantily clad girl wanting to add you was some low-life in a basement trying to spam affiliate links at you, only that scantily clad girl is a guy in a suit trying to get a recruiting commission from spamming your inbox."
- People don't add you. People request to add you. There is a difference. I don't accept requests from people who I either A) don't know B) don't care to network with. I don't see how this is different than any other social network.
"Don't get me started on the skill endorsements feature. I get tonnes of emails everyday saying "Joe X has endorsed you for Java" even though Joe knows nothing about Java nor do I. People are endorsing me for skills that I don't even posses or have, what a joke."
- Joke or not I'll know the difference between someone's actual skills if I was a recruiter/hiring manager after asking them about said skill. I interview many candidates who I see write lots of languages on their resume. I'm not going to go through the list and ask about each one, but the skills endorsements are useful in that I know what I should focus on when I interview them to see if they actually know it. Anyone can lie about anything on any social network.
"Want to network? Get someone's business card and their phone number, store it into your phone and don't rely on a website comprised of spam to build up a network."
- Please. Especially for people in the technical industry. Waste of trees for the person receiving the card and waste of money for the person buying the card. I don't think I've ever called someone after meeting them for the first time at some sort of event, then again I'm not in sales; I prefer more passive introductions.
Complaints such as "Sadly, I didn't take a screenshot of the suggestion I apply to work as a SAP consultant in Germany, though I don't speak German or have the word 'SAP' on my profile. "
The thing to keep in mind is that LinkedIn's job, in this area, is to offer great options to advertisers. On Facebook I can put an advert out targeting a specific age, a specific city, and specific interests. Or I can just target... a huge number of people. If I do the latter, do you blame Facebook for not using their data properly?
I've never advertised on LinkedIn. Maybe it's awful, it could well be. But seeing badly targeted adverts means absolutely nothing.
> But seeing badly targeted adverts means absolutely nothing.
You don't think that advertisers are willing to pay more for well-targeted ads? This is a strong sign that LinkedIn is not leveraging their data as well as they could.
- Advertisers who don't understand what they are doing with automated systems [1]
- Advertisers whose specific target is too small, so they widen the net [2]
- Advertisers who would rather waste a bit more money to keep the net wide [3]
Point 1: remember that plenty of advertisers are old-school, they're used to signing off campaigns over lunch or drinks, not to fiddling with settings on a website. Hell, I'm 23, so far from oldschool, and a.) I have often chosen less targeted advertising options (based on performance of KPIs) and b.) I don't like getting involved in specific stuff like Facebook advertising - I hired someone to do that for me, but maybe if I knew even less about it I wouldn't have even thought to do that.
Points 2/3: Some people are going to be your target audience without the data showing it. Just because someone doesn't list SAP as a skill, doesn't mean they don't have it. Just because they aren't in Germany, doesn't mean they wouldn't consider moving for the right opportunity. Just because someone isn't a fan of McDonalds on Facebook it doesn't mean they won't be interested in a KFC advert.
edit: Of course, LinkedIn offering poor features is also a possible explanation. As I said I've never used it (for advertising) and have no interest in exploring it as I only deal with B2C marketing.
I think his/her point was that LinkedIn might have those features, but customers don't _have_ to use them.
So you can pay more for better targeting, which is probably an intelligent way to get the users you want, but there could be companies that just ignore logic and want the cheapest way to blast out a message.
In the authors case I think it means IBM isn't leveraging LinkedIn's data. It could the case that some HR person checked off "programming" and left it at that. I can't imagine someone at LinkedIn going back and fixing all the vague job descriptions that go through their system.
LinkedIn has always been a good professional networking tool. But because it's a professional networking tool, exploring new opportunities is rife with risk (as the OP alludes to). Great opportunity discovery is about what you want to do, not just what you have done, and that isn't necessarily public information.
Mighty Spring helps you find interesting jobs discretely -- a private place for you to manage your career.
ps. We're in private beta, but will expedite invites to all you hacker news folks that sign up :)
The biggest problem that good developers have when it comes to recruiting is that they hate recruiters, and the best way to guarantee that you get spammed by every recruiter in a thousand-mile radius is to tell something like LinkedIn that you're looking. Mighty Spring solves this problem by providing candidates with the ability to check out relevant jobs and indicate interest _completely anonymously_. No alerting recruiters. No alerting your boss.
Disclaimer: I'm the front-end guy for Mighty Spring :)
I'm getting a standard http "authentication required" dialog from bugherd.com when visiting your site.
I'm guessing this is because I have httpsEverywhere installed (a firefox extension that tries to use https wherever possible). Visiting bugherd.com gives me the same error, so it appears it's a problem on their end. Still, it leaves a bad impression. You might want to disable whatever you are using from them.
I am about to start a new job search and was realizing the shortcomings with Linkedin. You have an interesting approach to the job search, I just signed up!
Not sure what the monetization strategy would be, or whether it'd be a TOS violation, but some of the features mentioned in the article would be great to have.
yeah linkedin has tons of useless stuff.. i just keep my cv updated, trying to avoid reading news, or subscribing to groups. i've actually have found few jobs through linkedin posted job offers. Most of recruiters sending automated messages with invitations which I always decline. there's no way to communicate with your connected person.. no chat, no email provided.. it's easier to grab name and surname, and write PM through facebook. in my country linkedin is not so popular and recruiters actually writing nice messages with a good suggestions, that's how i've found a job in barclays. After living 2 years in netherlands.. i still get lot's of spam from there. Sometimes it's seems for me that only my country has a culture of recruiting, all others just spamming to get your attension.
Compared to the other ongoing social networking experiments that generate constantly exploding datasets of worthless noise, LinkedIn is a very different story. Their data is the most interesting.
Today the focus is on individuals. Tomorrow it will be groups.
Agreed. LinkedIn's been awful for a long time and unfortunately nothing has paralleled its popularity... hoping something that doesn't suck will come up and sink it into irrelevance in the abyss of the interwebs as Facebook did to MySpace.
Click on about on his blog. He has a link to his own goddamn LinkedIn profile right there. If he hates it so much why does have such a nicely filled out and active LinkedIn profile.
I get a little too much spam from LinkedIn.
The default mail digest option is daily, and unless one changes it each time after joining a new group, one can expect an inbox flood
The purpose of LinkedIn is to connect in the business world, I don't know a single user who doesn't connect to their current colleagues, including their boss.
I didn't and have had people say to me that they don't connect with current colleagues.
I also don't connect with recruiters until I have announced that I am leaving. I'll happily chat with them via private messages or give an alternative email address.
There is no benefit in the default behavior of having the system send all your contacts, including your boss and HR colleagues that you have made a new recruiter friend today.
I guess it depends on what you want to get out of LinkedIn, and your situation. Personally, my relationship with colleagues/boss is such that if I think about leaving they'll know about it from me first, and if I added a recruiter as a contact they wouldn't even think about it. But apart from that, my use-case for LinkedIn is primarily connecting with people I do/have work/ed with, to help us stay connected should we need to work again in the future, and so other people can see who I know and who knows me. If and when I leave my job, I won't be looking at adverts or to be contacted by recruiters, I'll be leaving for a job offered by someone I already know in the industry.
But appreciate that for other people, they might want to use it completely differently.
Aren't you already connected to your boss and other current work colleagues through, you know, work? I've only connected with current colleagues when I know they won't tattle, and never connected with a boss until I've given notice. If your main use case for LinkedIn is to find work through your connections (as it is for many people), it seems a little thoughtless to connect with people who not only won't help you find work, but will be unhappy to know that you're even looking.
EDIT: OK, I don't mind downvotes, but could you please explain why? After factoring in actual work hours, company social events/groups, water cooler/lunchroom chat, and internal company communication channels (email/phone/IM/etc), what sort of connection is missing that LinkedIn provides?
It provides a sense of validity to people who may know your boss and see you, as an employee of theirs, as being competent and proficient at your job role.
Say I work as a design engineer. My boss is probably older and more experienced. He may have worked at competing firms previously and has connections there. I connect with him, and he's connected with former colleagues. They want to recruit and so start looking around the networks of people in the industry and region.
Because I'm connected to my boss, I am more exposed in their ads. They see the mutual connection and consider that partial confirmation that if I'm employable under him, I'm probably a decent employee.
Networking with existing colleagues, including your boss, helps create exposure of your profile to others in the industry by utilising the connections that your (usually more experienced and more connected) boss has. I'd almost be willing to bet that connecting 'upwards' to more experienced people is on the whole far better for your profile exposure than connecting 'downwards' to lesser-experienced employees (e.g.: you as a mid-level employee connecting to new graduates entering your workforce).
I understand that connecting 'upwards' is better (I'm connected with all my former bosses). But if my boss's former colleagues got into the habit of shopping for new employees in his current workforce, they would not remain connected for very long. Perhaps this is a regional difference (I am not in SV). After I'm no longer a current employee (and socially OK to extend a job offer to), I still get all the benefits you mention, except that I also have the benefit (in several cases) of my former bosses sending me tips about jobs in their network that aren't listed on LinkedIn, and I don't have the downsides of announcing to my current boss if I'm shopping around.
I'm not in SV either (AU mech. engineer). My industry (rail) is pretty insular however, so there's usually a lot of crossflow between the various parties involved in it.
I agree with you that the inability to customise who your updates go to is pretty bad. That's a pretty basic feature and I'd expect to be more integral to LinkedIn than, say, Facebook.
View source on this thing. The entire post is there at least two times in different formats. I like the whole "&nbsp" thing in one of them. I didn't go looking for others.
Regardless, why is this such a common response to these types of posts? I understand the angle of "don't be entitled to a free service," but there's also the alternative interpretation of "here are some fundamentals your business is missing, and my humble suggestions."
building on this: the feature set for paying customers (recruiters, internal/external) seems pretty solid, from the few articles I've read; so it seems to fit the saying exactly.
I have a feeling in my soul that "social media" is going to move into a more organic space in a way that means the most to the advertisers (or governments) that want deep information about target demographics. What I mean by this is that as the companies grow (and thus move away from niche market into infrastructure), they become too large to retain meaning to end users in an important way. What I'm saying here might be a little too cerebral for 2am, but it's the same reason Google just doesn't have the granularity to capture the mom-and-pop advertising market like they want (and consistently cannot achieve, if you pay attention to their stream of product inventions and reinventions). Facebook has started to lose its appeal on an accelerating timeline, and I believe that companies like Facebook and LinkedIn -- that are desperate for growth curves and thereby "smoothing off" the niche market granularity in an effort to streamline the company to afford maximal growth -- are going to be a "yeah, I knew that chick in high school" kind of utility that contains cursory information, but really lacks the depth of social networking that is the sought-after distilled end product that everyone dreams about, where your close friends are able to keep up with you online in a fashion that closely resembles your real life social graph. This information and depth -- the kind that is highly marketable and extremely valuable to all kinds of enormous, information-hungry organizations -- will be contained in little "what app.net wanted to be" bubbles that all intermix through network APIs to other social media bubble companies.
Unless someone is capable of building a Facebook/LinkedIn that won't info grab and bother the shit out of every contact you've ever had, while maintaining that "niche market" feel for every user, and while keeping that "closely resembling real life social activity graph" feel.
Up until that point, my contact list was limited to people that I personally knew and could recommend. Now, months later, I am still getting successful "contact accepted" replies from people that I barely know. I.e everyone who ever contributed to any mailing list that I was ever subscribed to.
I even got replies from people asking why I contacted them. I have no idea how many people remain to accept my invitation or even who they are.
What a disaster. It has changed for me, an early user of the site, what was a useful database of the people I know, to now some random connection of strangers.
The worst part is the link to connect to Gmail still appears and I'm sure that it doesn't clearly indicate what it's intention is. So, if you have connected with an email provider in the past be wary of allowing it to connect again.
And yes, if you let any site connect to your personal data, expect the worst outcome...