Thursday, October 18, 2007

LinkedIn: No Booze Mail Allowed

LinkedIn is known for being resilient to all web 2.0 temptations, so hearing “We have no interest in doing it like Facebook with an open A.P.I. letting people do whatever they want" from their CEO wasn't surprising at all. Also often being called "first professional social networking site,"LinkedIn denies even being a social network.
Well, I would agree at certain point, I treat my LinkedIn profile page just like my resume: keep it up to date but really don't check it out unless there's a reason to. It's a nice tool for professionals to keep in touch with colleagues and collect endorsements and references. My friends never contact me via LinkedIn and frankly I don't have anyone in my connection list who would know me outside of workplace.
Linkedin does have some social elements to it: "Answers", comments, introduction through network and the ability to add your photo. All the above are features let you add some colors to plain boring resume page.
During the seminar "Effectively Leveraging Social Networking" at SMX Conference I learned some interesting facts about LinkedIn:
Did you know that average income of LinkedIn user is $140,000?
Also I had no idea that LinkedIn pages don't have "no follow" tag so basically by asking the people in your company linking to the company's website you can really boost it's rankings.

Anyway, LinkedIn will probably stay the conservative, strictly professional website that will be Internet version of your CV, but it will be interesting to see the stats for this year. Last year LinkedIn had an astonishing growth rate of 164%

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