Thank you LinkedIn. Good riddance. While you are at it, how about fixing/retiring the following things as well:
- Endorsements. They serve no purpose other than "look I am so cool" and for recruiter to find you by keywords that does not make much sense. Plus I have no interest in getting endorsed by my uncle for something he has no clue about.
- Groups: These end up being nothing but recruiter spam.
- Stop the spam of "Please join linkedin premium trial for 30 days". I get this email every other week. If I am interested, I would have joined by now. Don't you get it.
- And the classic one. It is ok for you to spam my gmail contacts but I cannot even send a group email to all my connections at once (you have a stupid cap)? One use case is that during the Christmas/new Year time, I like to send a note to all my contacts saying hi. Yes not very pesonalized but for me the whole point of linkedin is to stay in touch with my professional connections. Guess what ? You limit the number of connections I can send a note to in one message. really ?
I just applied to several jobs within the last few days; Jobvite lets me "one-click" apply with my LinkedIn profile, which is so much easier than those "upload your resume and we're going to mangle it in our web form".
Disclaimer: Received several calls back same day/next day, in my mind that means its working as its supposed to.
I'm gay, and a friend and former colleague went through a period of regularly endorsing me with anything that sounded at all that could sound either camp or gay. I can't seem to figure out how to find them now, and off the top of my head the only one I can think of is Pearl (I'm not a programmer, and I doubt he even knows Pearl is there as a programming language). Meanwhile I'd return the favour with anything that hinted towards the fact that he's a massive pervert.
Was great fun for a while, and the only use I've ever had from endorsements, which I've now completely disabled.
It's probably the most first world problem that could possibly exist. Ughhh fuck I'm so tired of making six figures while someone else offers me that!!
I didn't even know you had to accept endorsements. And as ridiculous as they are, I never did bother to return the 'favor.' Perhaps this is just another incarnation of "you didn't Like my post" Facebook drama.
Groups is a good idea that's being poorly used. Some groups are set up to promote a single person or group, yet have generic names. Others are used by people not familiar with Stackexchange for asking technical questions.
They make sense for a professional networking site, but they have to be guided towards relevance.
Are endorsements faked? I've deleted my account, but next time I would ask your uncle if he actually endorsed you for X, because I have a strange feeling they are completely fabricated.
An open-source version of the backend code would be pretty awesome, though. It was a smart idea even if it wasn't well-suited to the use it was put to. Wouldn't it be neat if you could have extra contextual info added to your e-mails without having to install anything on your phone or mail client? It could be made modular so whatever services you use could provide plugins you could add/remove at will -- CRM, lead tracking, sender analytics (this person e-mails you 3X a week?), Amazon links for products, social network profiles, etc. If you host it yourself, you don't have the privacy issues of (another) 3rd-party having access to your mail.
LinkedIn's biggest problem can be traced to a single line of code: the placeholder that reads, "I would like to add you to my professional network."
The joy and excitement of real-life networking stems from meeting someone, recognizing that you share an interest or skillset, and connecting on the basis of that skill or interest.
For example, if I discuss JavaScript w/ a developer at a networking event, I keep him or her in mind for my next JS project. With in-person networking, I know not only who is in my network, but how and why they might want to collaborate.
By allowing for a meaningless, generic prompt, LinkedIn strips the excitement out of networking. It makes the game about quantity more than quality. Users end up with broader networks, but they fail to understand the meaning or potential of those connections.
Isn't LinkedIn supposed to be for maintaining contact with people you've already met? So you should already have experienced the excitement of meeting the person before you see the boring generic message.
I wonder if this was killed because of low acceptance, or because of the privacy and security concerns? Did Apple ever speak about this being any type of concern?
I'm guessing low acceptance. It was an interesting hack, but honestly, could you picture anyone clamoring for this feature? And then getting past the setup steps?
Frankly I thought it was a pretty shocking product to launch, for all the predicable reasons it was panned, until I contrived a more charitable explanation: LinkedIn management is willing to greenlight goofy "20%-style" projects by the engineers.
Not that many people care/are aware about the privacy/security issues at stake.
It was too much of a niche thing (i.e. not for iphone's "average" users) and from a big enough player that Apple wouldn't protest.
But it was a complicated and long process to install/configure it. I doubt many non-geeks bothered. So it probably never got any traction beyond a few thousand users. Not worth keeping around at Linkedin's scale.
The most interesting thing I notice about this announcement is that LinkedIn is using an Oracle product to do their customer support. I'm getting tired of sites that don't allow my back button to navigate away from them.
- Endorsements. They serve no purpose other than "look I am so cool" and for recruiter to find you by keywords that does not make much sense. Plus I have no interest in getting endorsed by my uncle for something he has no clue about.
- Groups: These end up being nothing but recruiter spam.
- Stop the spam of "Please join linkedin premium trial for 30 days". I get this email every other week. If I am interested, I would have joined by now. Don't you get it.
- And the classic one. It is ok for you to spam my gmail contacts but I cannot even send a group email to all my connections at once (you have a stupid cap)? One use case is that during the Christmas/new Year time, I like to send a note to all my contacts saying hi. Yes not very pesonalized but for me the whole point of linkedin is to stay in touch with my professional connections. Guess what ? You limit the number of connections I can send a note to in one message. really ?