Recently, I have been spending some time on linkedin. Of all the social networks out there, it has the most appeal to me: There is less nonsense on it, and people are motivated to use it for work. Bergie had this link to an essay on linkedin as a platform play that I wanted to comment on.

full public profile

There’s still a tragically high barrier to entry: without logging in to LinkedIn, you can only view a summary of the profile. This is total crap: it doesn’t make it easy for me as a user to extend the reach of LinkedIn. I’d love send that URL as my resume to people, but if they have to create an account to log in to LinkedIn, I’m not going to do it.

My public linkedin profile is already in the top 20 google results for my name. Making this more full-fledged would allow people to better take charge of their public image on the internets (something increasingly important)

show linkedin data elsewhere

For example, it’d be awesome if there was a JavaScript include that would list people’s endorsements of you. I’m sure people would love to put that in their blogs. And it’d be great for the coders out there if all the data in LinkedIn could be retrieved with simple REST calls that returned simple, XML formatted data-documents.

Linkedin has a lot of (currently dormant) currency it could use to become an important platform for user ratings. Just like Ebay has its seller / buyer ratings, the endorsements are quite valuable, but are locked into Linkedin today. The system would need better ways to deal with people who game the system, but it is off to a terrific start.

linkedin RSS feeds

It’s frankly shocking that there aren’t LinkedIn feeds for events that occur in your social network. When someone gets a new job, you get an endorsement, someone else gets an endorsement, someone adds a new contact…all those activities that people may want to respond to are locked up in the system.

We are all busy, and who remembers to always go check the Linkedin homepage for new things happening? That’s so 1998.

company ratings

You could even imagine something like this: people can write in their experiences applying for jobs at different companies. When you ask LinkedIn to send you resume to a job, it could tell you people’s over-all feel for that company. That’s the kind of collective/emergent wisdom that only a hosted application like LinkedIn can do.

Companies are people too 🙂 Why not make it possible to see how a company is viewed overall?

company drill-downs

Speaking of hosted applications, LinkedIn could become the org-chart application for companies everywhere. Most large companies I’ve worked at had that funky applet you could go to in the intranet and pan through the org-chart. LinkedIn already has a ton of data that people have agreed to put in the clear. Instead of those boring, information skinny org-charts you’re used, LinkedIn could provide a much richer, and fatter org chart. Want to see endorsements that people have given Jane in IT? Does the fact that Jack has no endorsements mean you should avoid giving him The Big Project?

I am sure a lot of people are already using Linkedin to reverse engineer org charts from companies they do business with. Why not make this easier? If you are concerned about headhunters, offer a more competitive / attractive work environment. Is Linkedin listening? I’d sure like to see these things implemented. What do you think?
2006-12-04: LinkedIn, the MySpace for adults. Puff piece. They criticize the network spammers (mostly HR people), but offer no solution. They also think it is at a tipping point. I think so too. Much preferred over the crappy german xing

An investment from Hoffman would be the last piece of angel funding the startup needs. Now the 2 entrepreneurs must find people to help take their company to the next stage. “We are looking for a set of advisers who really understand the arc that a startup goes through. We need to identify who in our network can help us.”

2006-12-18: in which linkedin kills the headhunter middleman

They have an amazing job posting service where you can post the job on LinkedIn for around $150 and then it gives you the option of sending the not to people on your contact list. For someone like me that means I get to send to my best contacts easily.

2007-01-15:
2008-01-05: LinkedIn Data Export. This worked great with gmail import. Now I have updated contact info for my whole network. Gmail did a nice merge for email addresses I already had.
2013-09-07: LinkedIn Spam. On the “thought leadership” spam that has infected linkedin. I’m still waiting for linkedin to be useful someday. It has been years now. I liked this comparison:

standing around on garish hotel ballroom carpet with a plastic cup of cheap chardonnay in one hand and a stack of business cards in the other.

2013-10-25: LinkedIn MITM email.

LinkedIn Intro is a new service by LinkedIn, adding inline data to all your iOS emails. “But how can they read my emails?!” you ask: you use the best encryption money can buy! Well, you just need to install one little security certificate… after all, how much of a a bad idea can it be? LinkedIn are well-known for their good security practices!

2022-10-20: And now it’s all fake accounts, the eventual fate of all social networks.

On October 10, 2022, there were 576562 LinkedIn accounts that listed their current employer as Apple Inc. The next day, 50% of those profiles no longer existed. A similarly dramatic drop in the number of LinkedIn profiles claiming employment at Amazon comes as LinkedIn is struggling to combat a significant uptick in the creation of fake employee accounts that pair AI-generated profile photos with text lifted from legitimate users.