All Is Flux: Thoughts on LinkedIn

Funny what you get in your Feedster searches, sometimes dreck, sometimes great stuff. This is the later. I had similar experience, or nearly, on LinkedIn. There was someone I wanted to contact for some reason, maybe to pitch an idea or just a friend of a friend kind of connection. It could also have been someone who I knew, but didn’t have an e-mail address for. In any case I was getting the process going of “requesting a contact” and realized that my request was going to have to go through at least one person I had no relationship with and didn’t know me from Adam. Sure I think it’s okay to ask a friend to introduce you to a friend, but the friend of a friend thing can’t happen very often. Too many degrees of separation I think.

Disagree, though, on LinkedIn’s lack of usefulness. I think it is only now starting to come into usefulness. I’m fascinated how many people I have in common with other people. And I think if I know Bill and Bill knows Sue, I think Bill might be willing to intro me, if I e-mail Bill outside of LinkedIn to tell him why I was making the request.

Social networking is really in its infancy. I think before we pass too harsh a judgement we should give it a little time to mature.

All Is Flux: Thoughts on LinkedIn

Are you a member at LinkedIn? Recently, I was hoping to get in touch with someone at a certain company, so I did a search by company name. I found some people who were only two degrees away, meaning that I knew someone who knew the person. So I sent my friend a message, asking him what he knew about the guy I was ?targeting? and the company in general. It turns out that he didn?t know the guy very well.