Fallen out of love with LinkedIn?
swiss-miss.com
swiss-miss.com
However I do have one thing to vent about: LinkedIn uses a phishing technique after you're logged in by showing you your email address and then a password field which makes it very easy for you to mindlessly input your email password (as they want) so they can spam all your contacts.
I've been saved from this mistake many times by having different LinkedIn and Gmail passwords, but this really shouldn't be acceptable...
But you, and others, are accepting it, so by definition it's acceptable.
At what point do principles finally trump convenience?
I think there is value to be found in a professional networking / career site, but for me, LinkedIn did not cut it.
A couple of months ago I got an email from them along the lines of "We noticed you haven't logged in in awhile. You have a message waiting from someone in your extended network!". I log in, and no message - but I am presented a page prompting me to let them scrape my gmail and/or add people from a list they think I might know.
I haven't used LinkedIn in a long time, and I should really attempt to delete my account.
If I started getting lots of invites from people I trusted, then I might consider joining. But I'd never even heard of them before reading this article.
LinkedIn goofed up ONCE in allowing your face in ads when you have some connection to the company. That's nowhere near as slimy as Facebook putting your face on ads you'd never even CLICKED on (famously a woman saw her HUSBAND in a picture advertising a singles site...), and that's just the tip of Facebook's privacy betrayals.
And since LinkedIn has a totally dominant market share (and mind share) in "business connections," it's going to likely take a lot more than a better design and easy import to dethrone them.
It looks like the hook is "use us to host your online resume! We'll make it pretty!" That approach has some potential; I'll keep my eyes open for a Zerply-hosted resume moving forward.
It's only fairly new, but I think the value will come from endorsements more than connections.
If you're looking to hire a developer, does it really matter if you know me or know someone that I know. What's the point of linking to people you already know anyway?? If you're looking to hire someone, it's far more important to understand their reputation than it is to understand how you're connected to them.
In this case, it was not Facebook who put that picture there, but an advertiser, who got and used that picture in a way that was against Facebook's Terms of Service, and Facebook then blocked that advertiser.
edit: Look at the one line positive comments that appeared straight after posting this article. Really funny.
Besides the general attention that an article like this gives this is also a perfect SEO tool.
Personally, what I think that these dudes are doing is building a linking pyramid that passes on the famed Google juice from Y Combinator (PR 7) via the blog article (contextual links, a big thing after the Google Panda update) to their own site.
Anyone can find person X to write a semi-beliveable article about their service or tool and submit it here. Clever stuff but not clever enough.
Actually, kind of dumb, because sooner or later, people running this message board will have to rethink what types of articles can be linked to.
I've only had one recruiter approach me in several years on linkedin (and even he didn't have anything more interesting to sell me than DE Shaw, who had already collected my resume for their "Hey look how many people we reject" pile).
Exactly. If they had a way to mark a job from a recruiter as irrelevant which caused their account to be flagged then they may create an actually useful service for job seekers, but until then I just keep getting emails about .net jobs in Omaha.
I also no longer need to maintain another resume online. It IS my online resume. And instead of saying "recommendations available on request", they're right on that same page.
Finally, it's a way to find people to work with you, if you're hiring. If you're always on the "being hired" side of the equation and never on the "hiring" side, then you won't experience that, but it's hard to find good people, and it's great to have friends-of-friends available as a resource.
On an unrelated note, I expected that to be the website of Martina Hingis.
Things not to do on LinkedIn: post job ads; pay for "super" account; pay for special magic messages.
Otherwise, LinkedIn is pretty great.
If you're not actually on the business side of a business, I can see why you'd think it was useless.
Are you trawling through LinkedIn profiles for candidates? If you use LinkedIn to research current applicants, what information would you find on LinkedIn that is missing from a traditional resume?
LinkedIn, however, is the "disruptive" potential company in the third-party recruiting space. It will be interesting to see if they do so :)
They made a bit dent in many contingent recruiters introducing pay-for-job posting (versus posting jobs in groups, which is SPAM heavy).
LinkedIn answers and groups, however, has gone the way of mostly spam or, those trying to establish "LinkedIn" expert status' (statusi? :D). I believe many thought that owning a large group would somehow lead to monetization. Currently, groups are only moderated by the group leaders, with LinkedIn more hands-off in the approach, killing nice networking potentials.
As a caveat, day job = LinkedIn recruiting on a 10% basis, whereas off work, I like to actually interact with the groups, Answers (not lately due to poor quality) and connect with interesting people unrelated to technical recruiting.
Clearly it's not the case that no one gets any value from LinkedIn, as evidenced by the other commenters and the fact that they still exist. Perhaps its use falls along age or professional lines? I and my friends/contacts fall on the younger side of things; is it more prevalent among an older crowd? Among non-programmers? Among programmers at larger companies?
I think its got more value for people in sales or business development then day to day engineers. But YMMV
• You've got a conf call with 3 people from a company and you want to figure out what their roles there are and other useful bits (where they studied, where they've worked, and other tidbits that can warm up a conversation).
• You want to figure out the rough size of a company you're doing a sales call with.
• You're cold calling and you want to figure out who to cold call.
• You meet a half dozen people at a networking event and would rather have their LinkedIn info than their business card for future reference.
• You want an intro to somebody who you suspect is only a contact or two away, but don't know which contact or two.
• You want to background check a potential consultant / hire and want to figure out who to run those checks by.
Before I started a company I found it pretty useless too. (All of the jobs I'd gotten had always come via intros in my offline personal network, so I never saw its utility there.)
It has essentially replaced the Rolodex people used to use years ago.
If you aren't open to recruiters reaching out to you, you can make that plain and clear in your summary... "I don't speak with recruiters" or "Not looking for a position."
On the other hand, every single contact I've received from recruiters has demonstrated that not a single one managed to actually READ my LinkedIn profile.
> "By placing any information or other material on such publicly accessible locations on the Website (including but not limited to posting messages, uploading files, inputting data or engaging in any other form of communication), you automatically grant (or warrant that the owner of such content has expressly granted) to Zerply a perpetual, royalty-free, non-exclusive, irrevocable, unrestricted, worldwide license to use, copy, sublicense, reproduce, distribute, redistribute, modify, adapt, publish, edit, translate, transmit, create derivative works of, publish and/or broadcast, publicly perform or display any materials or other information (including without limitation, ideas contained therein for new or improved products or services) you submit to public areas of the Website (including but not limited to chat rooms, forums and bulletin boards) alone or as part of other works in any form, media, or technology whether by any means and in any media now known or hereafter developed and to sublicense such rights through multiple tiers of sublicenses."
Just because I post something publicly doesn't make it publicly owned (or in this case, owned by the host)—I want to retain the copyright to my works, and this T&C says "nope, we own whatever you post here."
In the end, it was too much for me, and I didn't complete the signup process. If I'm completely wrong about it's meaning or intent, well, shrug, they should write T&C that you don't have to be a lawyer to grok.
LinkedIn isn't perfect, but I use it for the following purposes:
To find out about companies (who do I know who works there? how big are is the company? what sort of people do they employ?)
To find out about potential co-workers (job applicants, or interviewers when I'm on the other side of the desk, or people I meet other ways): who do we know in common (maybe someone I know who's worked with them can tell me how they were), what else have they done, etc.
Some of their discussion groups are interesting, some are useless.
I haven't yet used them for job hunting, but I expect eventually I may. I have used them for background research on a company I was already considering working for.
I don't go to LinkedIn for the "beauty" of their design, I go there for information. I don't need "profile pages themed by world-class designers" for that.
Poor spelling shouts "limited resources and lack of professionalism" loud and clear. If you're asking people to trust you with their data and put time into profiles, you need to show that you're big and serious.
I don't use LinkedIn because it's the coolest kid on the block, I use it because I need to find people to hire, network with, and in the past I've needed it to find gigs and jobs.
I'm going to go where the most people are, and where I feel most confident that my data will be managed professionally.
I'm not going to jump ship for a startup just because LinkedIn is requiring me to opt out if I don't want my picture to appear near an ad. That's not Armageddon, it's just a minor, and ultimately inconsequential, annoyance.
My point is that if that detail is missed, I begin to worry about other, more important details - such as security and the safety of my data.
Think of it as the "brown M&M test."
Wow. High fives to you for supporting the little guy.
Personally, I think there aren't enough sites with a personality and sense of humor. I get the point that the very serious career types will not appreciate this, but they might not be Zerply's target audience. I'll also point out that the home page looks fine, nothing silly there. It seems they are just trying to diffuse tension on an error page with humor.
I'm referring to the repeated use of "your" instead of the correct word, "you're."
Also, where else can you find so many "Social Media Marketing Experts" in one place ;).
No affiliation, I have an account, and use it more than LinkedIn.
It'll do well.
I must give them koodos on how easy they make closing an account.