Your Vanity is Devaluing LinkedIn

I use Twitter every day. Anyone can follow me, and Ill follow anyone who looks interesting.

Facebook I use much less frequently and dont have (or want) many friends on there. Its more personal/family related, although I do have KashFlow RSS feeds plugged into it.

My problem is with LinkedIn. I find it a very useful network, but Iregularlyget connection requests from people I have very tenuous connections with or have never heard of:

– Twitter followers I have no interaction with, or just banter with
– KashFlow customers Ive never dealt with myself (theres nearly 10,000 of you now!)
– People I exchanged a few inconsequential words with at some event or another

You get the picture.

Ideally Id only connect on LinkedIn with people I know, worked with, done business with or would at least recognise if I bumped into them somewhere.

Theres two reasons I dont want to add other people.

Firstly, if they ask to be introduced to a genuine connection of mine, I cant tell the recipient of the intro anything at all about the requester. And if the requester turns out to be a muppet then it reflects badly on me.

Secondly is the same thing but in reverse. A genuine connection may see Im connected to John Random and want an intro. An intro via me to John Random isnt going to carry much weight as John hardly knows me Im just one of his 500+ connections. So again, a poor quality intro that John Random may not follow up reflects badly on me.

Adding tenuous connections seriously undermines LinkedIns usefulness.

I think its the whole race to get a high friend count that makes people want to add as many people as possible.

Am I missing something?
Do you have 500+ LinkedIn connections, most of whom you dont know from Adam? Why?
Would we all be better off without a published friend count, or is that an essential ingredient?

I am willing to have my mind changed on this, just as it was on the topic of Twitter badges

Tags: facebook, linkedin, vanity

This entry was posted
on Friday, September 24th, 2010 at 11:33 am and is filed under Ramblings.
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