LinkedIn, you’ve come a long way
Posted on May 20th, 2008 by sherrilynne
Last week my daughter pinged me on Facebook. ‘Check out LinkedIn, a kind of Facebook for business enthusiasts,’ she said.It made me smile that she’s pegged me as a ‘business enthusiast’, but she had reminded me about the very first online social network I’d joined back in 2006. Back then I’d joined up and quickly linked up to a handful of my professional associates from around the world. At the time I wrote in Strive Notes, ‘I quickly established 12 connections that plugs me into a network of 103 people (friends of friends). Taken a step further, I’ve got more than 38,000 new connections (friends of friends’ friends). The next thing for me to do is learn how to use this tool to make the most of these connections.’
Well I never did discover the real value and quickly forgot about it altogether. That is until last week when I was prompted. I spent some time revisiting LinkedIn over the weekend and was delighted with what I found. Not only had the site’s social features drastically improved, its community is reaching a critical mass that makes it a viable alternative to Facebook for us ‘business enthusiasts’.
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Being the developer who was lauded, courted and some may say duped into working for the Work Connexions (WorkX) project, I do feel quite disappointed that you think that the older site (my work of 12 months) was difficult to use. I’d be interested why you think this. Was it because of the software itself, or lack of direction or “message”? Being an advocate of accessibility and usability on the web, I find this quite worrying,
During the time of WorkX, which enjoyed such success that we struggled on our hosting platform and had to look for a dedicated server platform – which was never forthcoming, I saw LinkedIn and I did see what they were trying to do. But I honestly thought WorkX was better, with a couple of more features, WorkX could have been enjoying the same level of investment possibilities – maybe with some changes at the helm were needed – but the possibilities were there.
LinkedIn, I use it to connect. I have about 5 people in my immediate network. Big whoop. I can’t blog on there, I see no reason to go there everyday and only one of my so called connections have written any reference for me. That is not beneficial to my career! I forget about it until somebody stumbles on my profile and admits to knowing me. It provides no further purpose, for me. (Sayign that, I’ve put a linkt o my profile on my new site – may be that will change my mind)
$1bn? Seems as over valued and hyped as Facebook and Twitter – at least LinkedIn isn’t riddled with bugs. I’d have settled with a 100th of that money to drive WorkX to where it should have gone.
The price tag does seem a bit incredible agreed. I didn’t think your platform was difficult to use, just not intuitive.