Yes. Users with friends, an activity feed, and job classifieds are all solved problems that many underemployed web developers could throw a prototype together in weeks or a few months. Tack on that pointless skills voting junk and webboards as desired. Did I miss anything?
The fact that they have stockholders means they always have to do something: Google and driverless cars, Musk going to Mars, Facebook going phone...this IMAP hijacking is LinkedIn's current something that they have to come up with to have a story to tell investors so that they don't think LinkedIn is "stagnating."