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I agree with the sentiment - but that's not his central complaint. His central complaint is that LinkedIn is encouraging egregiously bad user actions (i.e., handing over 3rd party login credentials to LinkedIn).

I happen to agree, LinkedIn has a greater responsibility to its user base than maximizing conversion on its invite-a-friend feature.

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Facebook also does that!

It's one thing to access Contacts via oAuth, where LinkedIn gets no credentials. It's another thing altogether for them to request credentials and login on your behalf.

Even worse, what they're doing is completely unnecessary and probably more work than it should be. They can just request access to your contacts list using one of Google's APIs. Instead they're probably doing something far more complicated, using your email password to get access instead.

access to your contacts list using one of Google's APIs

Funny that more and more, email == gmail.

I guess there are a few of us around who still don't use it.

I read his blog post and wondered why he didn't just OAuth in. You're absolutely right. I just assumed he was on a Gmail account.

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