Off Topic

I use LinkedIn a lot, and find it of great benefit: I’ve had people contact me through LinkedIn about working with them, and I’ve used it to find people for the same reason. I have about 350 contacts, which gives me a network of over 1.5M people who I can search for and contact directly. As with most people, I use LinkedIn as a purely business network (although I do link to a few friends on it), not as a social network. It’s like Facebook for people with jobs.

One huge problem with LinkedIn was that you couldn’t remove any of your contacts yourself, you had to email to LinkedIn customer service and have them do it for you. In discussion about this very issue last night, Mark told me that there is now a way to remove contacts: go to the My Contacts page, then scroll down to the bottom right and there’s a link to remove contacts.

This morning, I did some pruning. First, a guy who I didn’t really know but we had both worked as contractors for the same company, who later spammed me with a MLM scheme — gone. Then, everyone who had been a contact for more than a year but still only had one contact (me): these are obviously people who heard about LinkedIn from me, said “oh yeah, I’ll try it”, then never went beyond accepting my initial invitation to join. Sorry, people, but you add no value to my network, and there’s no sign that you’re ever going to start.

Next, I’ll be going after the people with a very low number of contacts who haven’t updated their profile even though I know that they have moved jobs, especially those that still have their primary email address as that at their former employer: not only is their information stale, but with an incorrect email address, they’re unreachable through LinkedIn as well.