Leaving LinkedIn
I made the mistake of signing up on LinkedIn a couple of years back because it seemed like an interesting idea with some potential. I was wrong. This site has no value for me whatsoever, and I’ve asked that they close my account.
In about 2.5 years the only times I’ve logged into LinkedIn was to accept the invitations people sent me. The important concept that LinkedIn seems to have forgotten is that if they want people to stay, there actually has to be some value in it for them. And unless you’re an inveterate networker, I just don’t see what the value is. For me at least, social networking is an enabler, not an end in itself.
I also observed an interesting phenomenon: the ratio of invitations I received from people I knew well versus the people who were at best acquaintances was approximately 1:5.
So I apologize to all of you who have sent me invitations or requests for endorsements. I’m outta here.
Life at Eclipse 
I’ve used it lately to get back in touch with old school-mates and co-workers. I’m hoping maintaining that network will come in handy as it becomes necessary. I don’t get much noise, but then I don’t have the profile you do…
Doug Schaefer
June 7, 2007 at 1:10 pm
I think the real problem is that LinkedIn doesn’t allow us to indicate how well we know a relationship. Once they do that, I expect the site will have more value to me. It will allow random people who want to contact me to be able to get filtered via one of my contacts (and if they don’t know anyone, then they would need to have a good pitch).I guess my point is that having (even a part of) ones network explicitly known somewhere can enable activities in the real world by helping filter the noise.
Vineet
June 7, 2007 at 4:19 pm
Doug – I do use some other social networking sites to keep contact with social contacts. You know…what we used to refer to as “friends”? :-)Vineet – I agree that feature would help a little bit. At least that way there would be some indication of trust or the deepness of the relationship. But I predict it will also create as many problems as it solves. For example, relationship depth and trust are not static. They change over time. And maintaining a public reflection of those nuances on LinkedIn would fill me with fear and loathing.Maybe it’s my personality which is the problem. I’ve just never gotten any value out of maintaining a network of business associates the way LinkedIn does it. But perhaps my problem is that if I want to *really* give someone a reference or ask someone for a favour I *gasp* actually pick up the telephone and call them.But you have to remember that I’m old 🙂
Mike Milinkovich
June 7, 2007 at 4:39 pm
I’m actually very happy with linked-in. It’s a good way to find information about people that you talk to or have some other interaction with them.I’ve found many lost friends on linked-in. Also for the people that I don’t have day to day contacts with, it’s a kind of an address book that updates itself.It’s just that you don’t have to accept every invitation you get, and because of your position you probably get lots of them…
Genady Beryozkin
June 8, 2007 at 5:32 am
I find Linkedin very interesting. Maybe you never found the way to get linkedin for your business or is not the kind of tool you need to do business but I have made lot of contacts and some small business (by now) with Linkedin.On the other hand I find Facebook not so usefull for business yet, maybe in one month I will think completely different, maybe because Facebook and its open API let developers build something very interesting or just because linkedin open its own API and take the control again.
Fer
July 23, 2007 at 9:27 pm
Where t\
KnibeVeni
June 5, 2012 at 4:31 am
gergergeg
stableset
July 30, 2012 at 12:05 pm