If you don't have a linkedin account I highly recommend the experience of setting one up. It is horrible. You are upsold at every step of the process. Reminded at every step that you should import your contacts and just forced to use horrible defaults every step of the way. After you have an account you'd think the sane defaults would be to not spam you with every little thing that happens on the site. Nope, you manually have to turn all the spam off in at least 5 different places. Once you're done with the spam you now also have to disable all the nonsense default sharing settings in another 5 different places. The whole thing is just a usability nightmare and an example of what dark patterns look like in practice.
I don't know about you but if there was some other network for professionals to showcase profiles I would jump on that immediately. Linkedin is so horrible that if you make something and market it as 'Not Linkedin' you'll have the first few years of growth handed to you for free.
Viadeo is worst. I have closed my account like three of four times ... they keep reopening it and spamming me. If I receive another mail from them, I will complain to the CNIL.
Xing is made by a Perl company in Germany, specifically Hamburg. Having had some experience with other web-related companies, most german software is written with german content first, and little thought spent on localization, since serving an audience outside of germany is risky in that it means a lot of the company (support, etc.) has to be duplicated first, and it might end up having little draw. On the flipside, most Perl web frameworks are build with only one language in mind, English. Adding localization is extremely easy if you start out with it in mind, and i've actually been working on tools to ease that process, but after the fact it's a massive investment.
Due to all these factors the cost is simply too high for most german companies to even try.
>I don't know about you but if there was some other network for professionals to showcase profiles I would jump on that immediately.
What features would make this a killer? We are working on something that is in this general space and have a few ideas, including the ideas that started the project, but I'm curious what other pain points you can enumerate.
What would be a perfect linkedin substitute for you?
Coming at it from a slightly different angle (this is my sector)...
The big problem with LinkedIn is that it's a Jobseeker Database masquerading as a social network. They make their money by selling you to recruiters. That's the central cause of almost all the behaviour people don't like. The second part of that is that the social network part - the stickiness angle - really isn't a natural part, which is why it's so irritating that it wants to notify you that someone you worked with once published an article.
I'm afraid I don't know the killer features or the solution, but that's the root issue.
Happy to know people are working on substitutes. The perfect replacement for me would be a combination of Forrst and meetup. What I mean by that is that it should be some place where I can showcase my skills and get involved with like-minded individuals in the same or adjacent professions. As someone already mentioned linkedin is really just a recruiter database and the social aspects are completely forced.
Holy hell, their Captcha is one of the most aggressive I have ever seen on any website. It's literally impossible to solve and on top of that it's broken half the time.
I recently got access to a LinkedIn recruiter-level account, and it's frightening how much information recruiters have about someone. Not only can they look at anyone's linkedin profile, there are additional services (not affiliated with linkedin... I think) that keep a copy of everyone's linkedin profile, even if you delete it. They cross reference your linkedin profile with meetup, facebook, etc, to get an ultimate cyberstalking profile about almost anyone they want. I think it was called talentbin.com, but there are other sites as well.
Very, very creepy and this isn't even the NSA we're talking about, this is a recruiter.
Reminder that most or all of that information was volunteered by the stalkee. If the information isn't put on the web in the first place, it can't be found. Be careful with what you make public, folks. If you put it on the web, it is as good as public.
(Obviously this doesn't apply for things like shopping profiles, but probably that's not what you were talking about.)
Will work for now but you are still following a pretty straightforward 'pattern' that the algorithms can easily catch up with if algorithm authors wanted them to. (i.e. if too many people start doing this)
Hardly ironic. Companies that utilize customer data are the most at risk from reactions to government surveillance. Many people are much, much less concerned with a company having their data (which they will use to show you more effective advertising - i.e. things you actually want) than with the government having their data - which they are using in the explicitly adversarial process of determining if you are a criminal.
When the government forces Facebook, Google and LinkedIn to be complicit in their compromise of user data, people can no longer trust these companies to safeguard it, and it hurts the companies' bottom lines.
I don't see why it would be any different in the case of Google; but I don't personally use the Google services to any greater extent these days, so perhaps I'm just not feeling the ramifications ordinary users would.
I actually use Firefox's private browsing feature for browsing untrusted websites. That combined with NoScript should keep me quite (but obviously not entirely) anonymous.
Most other alternatives does not show you the names, resume and professional network of a substantial percentage of everyone who have visited your site.
The worst part is that LinkedIn will sell this information to anyone. There are several sites out there that allow you to put a Javascript snippet onto your page and thereby know the real names and any other details LinkedIn has for any "anonymous" website visitor to your site. One of my side programming jobs is a company that does Internet marketing and he had me put the snippet on all of his sites - it literally shocked me when I saw people's real names coming through the stats, all because they remained logged in to LinkedIn.
I generally only log in to LinkedIn with Internet Explorer now. It's the only site that I use Internet Explorer for.
I do "use" LinkedIn to get queries regarding opportunities and to keep in touch, but I'm not a frequent user.
However my most interesting recent usage of LinkedIn was signing up to pay for Inmail in order to be able to message a few high level executives at DHL to complain when a delivery was stuck in limbo. One day later and two Senior VPs (out of 3 I messaged) in different offices had told their staff to sort it and I was Cc:'d on a flurry of message exchanges that started or ended with pointing out that "SVP so-and-so wants to be kept in the loop".
Two days later the package that DHL for a month had told me they didn't have (and had told the sender was on it's way back to them), and couldn't have corrected the delivery address on even they did have it (it was accidentally - my own fault - sent to our old office) turned out to be sitting in a depot 5 minutes away, and was promptly delivered (to our new office).
That to me highlights a benefit of LinkedIn: Everyone can get access to relatively high level people, in part because the barrier to hassling them is high enough that it's not massively abused: If you're not in their immediate network you can contact them directly only if you've paid, and only quite few at the time. While it's annoying to have to pay, it's better than not being able to reach these people on occasion.
I'm going to consider using InMail that way whenever someone annoys me enough to be worth the cost of another month of InMail subscription from now on given how well it worked with my DHL problem.
That's really interesting. I've noticed that complaining on Twitter often helps things get moving when the telephone support is giving you the run-around, but I always assumed that was because I was airing their dirty laundry publicly. Seems like complaints via non-standard routes work even when private...
I think it worked because it still is unusual. The people I contacted presumably rarely hear directly from customers, and are so less likely to be "inoculated" against seeing those kind of complaints as normal.
Presumably most people want to do the right thing for their customers, but frontline staff often don't have authority, and soon gives up escalating systemic complaints (or even gets punished if the continue to bring it up), so if you don't get help right away the solution is often to find a way of bypassing the layer(s) that are powerless or have given up trying, and you find people that often do care deeply when they get to hear about such problems, but rarely do hear.
The moment something like this becomes common, these people will retreat from LinkedIn, or LinkedIn will take measures to protect them (win-win for LinkedIn: Let extra busy people make it more expensive to reach them)
I've used Twitter too, as well as my blog + Twitter. A few years ago I'd problem cancelling my cable subscription, and ended up getting a call from an assistant to the CEO of Virgin Media on the Saturday morning following a posting on the Friday. But in the case of DHL, Twitter too was a dead end - they seem to not care much about their Twitter feed.
Thanks for sharing. This is a great use for LinkedIn, and one I had never heard of. I'd always heard about access to executives for sales and research purposes, but not for kick starting customer service.
With LinkedIn being as bad as people say, why do people sign up to it?
For me, it's because not being part of the network is worse than being part of the network. LinkedIn is probably more prevalent in the business world than even having a Facebook or Twitter account, so to me it would look odd if I were not at least findable there, even if I don't maintain my profile.
It is completely useless in the sense that you can do the same thing with a simple blog and json file for your resume. The reason people use it is because it is an extremely simple way to showcase a professional profile in a place where every recruiter and their grandma knows is full of professional profiles.
It would be very easy to build an alternative. The hard part would be amassing the critical mass of recruiters. For a while Forrst was on the right track but it no longer exists.
I didn't take linkedin seriously until I lost my job. Having an upto date profile on LinkedIn does 2 things:
* lets recruiters see everything about you in one place
* suggests related jobs
Now, the story of how I got my current job: met guy at local Meetup, talked to him a bit and found out the company was hiring, and he would mention my name to recruiter. So, I add him on linkedIn, but get no call whatsoever from any recruiter. I see that there's a company recruiter on his connections and add her; explaining that I had met so and so at a meetup and there is an opening for a person with my skills so would she be kind enough to set me an interview? It takes some time, but I do get the interview, clear it, and all the other interviews as well.
I know of at least one blue chip firm that no longer pays headhunters, and now does all their recruiting via LinkedIn using the paid Recruiter features.
Because of the network effect. It is a lazy way to keep up a list of contacts you have worked with, that will automatically update itself when people move. I don't really plan to contact everyone in the future, but I sometimes look up what people are up to. It is good way to discover companies in your area of expertise.
If you sell services to business professionals, or Enterprise software, LinkedIn is a very powerful marketing and and market intelligence tool.
e.g. I already sell a product to lawyer John who practices speciality X. With LinkedIn it's easy to find all the people who look like John, and then try to pitch them on my product.
On one hand there are caveats with this, and on the other hand more opportunities. Here's one caveat that doubles as a benefit to someone doing this (assuming you want people to find your profile):
When looking at a profile, LinkedIn shows you lists of other profiles people who have looked at this profile looks at. You should presumably show up there far more often if your profile gets seen far more often. As a result your numbers will be skewed - you won't be able to tell who visited your website vs. came to your profile because it's suddenly showing up all over LinkedIn.
On other hand, that means actual human views of your profile is likely to go up substantially too.
I get an email to invite me to connect to someone every time (only three times so far) I merely visit their LinkedIn profile. I thought at first they had some premium feature but on second thoughts it was probably something like this.
I never have myself logged in to LinkedIn at the same time.
Backstory: An acquaintance of mine requested a connection soon after I met them for the first time. I was a little wary so didn't accept before speaking to them.
I found out later that it was a fake profile copied from his real one and they were a victim of identity theft.
Very interesting idea. Where do the authToken and authType come from though? Isn't it sufficient to have the classic LinkedIn profile URI [/profile/view?id=98261032]?
The article shows that the number of visits leaks to linkedIn.
Any idea whether the identities of visitor can be know from the "Who viewed your profile" page?
I don't know about you but if there was some other network for professionals to showcase profiles I would jump on that immediately. Linkedin is so horrible that if you make something and market it as 'Not Linkedin' you'll have the first few years of growth handed to you for free.