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Comment by lotharbot | Hacker News Reader

"why I know them" is a crucial feature missing from many services (along with "what name or alias I know them under").

I have hundreds of contacts from church, school, work, video games, etc.

Sounds like google's circles. The problem is that most folks treat their Gmail account as their "real" account and don't give it out willy-nilly. Also, that the circles thing is one-way - I can use circles to control how I see others, but can't use them to control how they see me.

which is good. i don't want some guy i met at a work thing once adding himself to my best friends circle.

> Also, that the circles thing is one-way - I can use circles to control how I see others, but can't use them to control how they see me.

No, if you share something to a circle someone isn't in they wont see it, so they do let you control how others see you. Not a huge G+ fan, but I was a fan of circles.

I mean having a fully different profile and name, not just different posts.

I was not that big fan of circles, made sharing with the wrong people easy.

I like that my personal life (facebook) and professional (linkedin) is two different networks. Its hard to accidentally share the the bad joke with my professional network.

I think something like circles could be done right -- if each circle had a custom background, etc. so that it looked and felt like a different website. I'm not worried about posting political rants to LinkedIn because it's obvious I'm on LinkedIn rather than FaceBook or Google+; I wouldn't be worried about posting to my coworkers group if there were very obvious signifiers that I was in that group.

IIRC, Facebook used to have this feature (ages ago), but it was removed. It used to ask where you knew someone from when sending a friend request, and it didn't let you send the request if you didn't know the person.

In the early days it allowed "I don't even know this person" as a reason.

yeah. Linkedin needs to implement this. Just a way to add notes that are only view-able to me would solve the problem.

On the profile page of your contact there is a "★ Relationship" button. Click that and it will let you add general notes or more detailed information about how you met.

who is that information viewable by?

I don't want to put in "obnoxious guy from conference" and then have that person be able to read it.

According to the LinkedIn help center [1]:

"Your note will be visible in the Relationship section of the profile and will only be visible to you."

Of course you may wish to store such information in a different system to avoid the possibility of LinkedIn inadvertently leaking the data.

[1] https://help.linkedin.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/43370/kw/W...

Would you trust them enough to be certain enough that it would always stay this way so you could safely put slanderous information about a person here? I certainly wouldn't.

Yeah, something that stores the data in a system I control and then pastes it on to the page with a greasemonkey script would be optimal.

But, then that would be work.

Too much work for the user or the developer?

For me... but I was assuming that I would be the developer. (and I don't know greasemonkey or javascript, so... it would be work.)

huh, cool. that's what I was asking for.

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