Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Jeff Atwood describes LinkedIn as a "Walled Garden" and says it
should be avoided. I agree with him in principal. In practice, I joined a while back at the request of a colleague, and I do find it a good way to keep track of the people I've built business relationships with over the years. Are there better ways to do so? Probably. But LinkedIn is nothing if not convenient.
Until, that is, you receive "invitations" from people on the fringe of your existence. These are the people that you exchanged words with in the copy room, so you feel bad declining their invitation, even though they had little to do with anything you did at that job (or worse, you have no idea what they do exactly). The worse offenders are those that just view a list of everyone who works or has ever worked at a common employer (regardless of whether they were even employed at the same time, same office, etc) and does a "select all, invite!" Recruiters love this. Twice, I have naively accepted these invitations, and both were followed with one or more spam messages through LinkedIn asking me if I could recommend someone for a job in St. Paul, MN or Dallas, TX or some such (I live in Philadelphia). I imagine that they've sent the same email to their oh-so-impressive list of 500+ contacts. If your LinkedIn contact list is upwards of the very low triple digits, you might want to re-think your inviting/accepting practices.
So far, I've not found a compelling reason to go through the
hassle of canceling my LinkedIn Account. But I do get a skeevy feeling every time I use the service, especially after I read Jeff's articles. I wonder what it will take to send me scurrying away.