All Is Flux: Thoughts on LinkedIn
Funny what you get in your Feedster searches, sometimes dreck, sometimes great stuff. This is the later. I had similar experience, or nearly, on LinkedIn. There was someone I wanted to contact for some reason, maybe to pitch an idea or just a friend of a friend kind of connection. It could also have been someone who I knew, but didn't have an e-mail address for. In any case I was getting the process going of “requesting a contact” and realized that my request was going to have to go through at least one person I had no relationship with and didn't know me from Adam. Sure I think it's okay to ask a friend to introduce you to a friend, but the friend of a friend thing can't happen very often. Too many degrees of separation I think.
Disagree, though, on LinkedIn's lack of usefulness. I think it is only now starting to come into usefulness. I'm fascinated how many people I have in common with other people. And I think if I know Bill and Bill knows Sue, I think Bill might be willing to intro me, if I e-mail Bill outside of LinkedIn to tell him why I was making the request.
Social networking is really in its infancy. I think before we pass too harsh a judgement we should give it a little time to mature.
All Is Flux: Thoughts on LinkedIn
Are you a member at LinkedIn? Recently, I was hoping to get in touch with someone at a certain company, so I did a search by company name. I found some people who were only two degrees away, meaning that I knew someone who knew the person. So I sent my friend a message, asking him what he knew about the guy I was ?targeting? and the company in general. It turns out that he didn?t know the guy very well.
Tris,
You're right: I was too hard on LinkedIn. But I think it's going to get worse before it gets better. And it might not get better. As LinkedIn grows under the current design, people are going to receive more unwanted contact requests. At some point people are going to decide to discount them. When this happens, LinkedIn becomes a nuisance, not a useful tool.
Clay Shirky wrote an interesting article, “The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview”. In it he argues that efforts like the Semantic Web and LinkedIn present an oversimplified view of the world. A simple undirected graph can't communicate the world's rich subtleties.
When the simple undirected graph that is LinkedIn oversimplifies, it disappoints its users. The folks at LinkedIn need to enrich their model of human relationships, but not so much that using it is a pain. That's a tough line to walk.
Tris,
You're right: I was too hard on LinkedIn. But I think it's going to get worse before it gets better. And it might not get better. As LinkedIn grows under the current design, people are going to receive more unwanted contact requests. At some point people are going to decide to discount them. When this happens, LinkedIn becomes a nuisance, not a useful tool.
Clay Shirky wrote an interesting article, “The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview”. In it he argues that efforts like the Semantic Web and LinkedIn present an oversimplified view of the world. A simple undirected graph can't communicate the world's rich subtleties.
When the simple undirected graph that is LinkedIn oversimplifies, it disappoints its users. The folks at LinkedIn need to enrich their model of human relationships, but not so much that using it is a pain. That's a tough line to walk.
Ed,
You might be right about LinkedIn getting worse before it gets better. Ironically I was invited in by someone I talked with once on the phone and haven't talked with since. On the other hand I did reconnect with an old colleague from my Glaxo days and he and I have several things on the go right now.
The nuisance connection requests are a problem. I was guilty of that a couple of times. Hey I've e-mailed this person a few times, they're on LinkedIn, let's connect! Now I'm more cautious and only ask for connections with people with whom I have connections.
Ed,
You might be right about LinkedIn getting worse before it gets better. Ironically I was invited in by someone I talked with once on the phone and haven't talked with since. On the other hand I did reconnect with an old colleague from my Glaxo days and he and I have several things on the go right now.
The nuisance connection requests are a problem. I was guilty of that a couple of times. Hey I've e-mailed this person a few times, they're on LinkedIn, let's connect! Now I'm more cautious and only ask for connections with people with whom I have connections.