The End of LinkedIn
It has begun
I got my first bogus invitation from LinkedIn the
other day. The person wanting to make a business connection had an undergraduate
degree from Harvard and an MBA from Wharton in 1997, but only had a two year
internship at Real Networks and was now a major manager at Microsoft. I had a
friend check the Microsoft address book. This person wasn't in it. Yet somehow
this person had amassed hundreds of links. I contacted LinkedIn to find out what
to do and was basically patted on the head and told to mail some generic e-mail
address related to Privacy. They obviously didn't
care.
LinkedIn has a few major flaws.
The major one has to do with it's main concept. It wants to be a source of
trusted business contacts by brokering your network. You are only supposed to
connect with people you know (and can vouch for) and they you can contact new
people through your trusted contacts. To ensure this, LinkedIn requires you to
know the e-mail address of someone you want to add to your network. This is
good, and bad. It makes it difficult to add people to your network whom you've
lost contact with (like former co-workers). LinkedIn solves this by letting you
invite people who worked for companies that you've worked for without knowing
their e-mail address. This has been good for me as I've re-connected with
co-workers I worked with years and years ago. The problem is that there is no
way for LinkedIn to verify your information, you contacts are supposed to be
that. So anyone can say they've worked for Microsoft and instantly invite
everyone on LinkedIn who have every worked there to join their network. Now,
theoretically, you aren't supposed to add anyone to your network that you don't
actually know. The problem is that having a small network goes against your
better interests. You want to have a big network of contacts, not a small one.
Also, people are starting to treat LinkedIn like other social networking site,
trying to see who could have the most
contacts.
I'm getting regular
invitations from people I don't know these days and I've stopped adding them now
that I realized that people are just faking their virtual resumes. The problem
is that at first I did add one or two people to my network who I might have
known, but wasn't sure. Here is another LinkedIn flaw. There is no way to remove
people from your network.
Now that
people are taking advantage of LinkedIn's flaws and they seem uninterested in
doing anything about it, I think that you will quickly see LinkedIn go the way
of Friendster, Orkut, etc...
Posted: Tue - September 27, 2005 at 09:13 AM
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