[icebraining]

> I wanted to see who I knew when LinkedIn first came out.

I'm curious, why? I sign up to different services (reluctantly) because I want to communicate with people I can't yet. Occasionally I might have some contacts on two networks, if there's some specific feature I want to use, but it's rare.

[nailer]

I wanted to stay in touch as they changed roles. I still do.

> Occasionally I might have some contacts on two networks, if there's some specific feature I want to use, but it's rare.

Are you sure you don't have business contacts who are also in your email address book?

[icebraining]

> I wanted to stay in touch as they changed roles

Sure, I might want that with a few coworkers, but not with my brother, aunt, friend's boyfriend or mother, tenant who rents my house, the shop who delivers butane, etc. Essentially 95% of my contacts are not relevant to a specific network, and dumping them indiscriminately seems not just bad form, but time wasting for me and them as well.

> Are you sure you don't have business contacts who are also in your email address book?

Yes, but they are a small subset of both circles.

[nailer]

> but not with my brother, aunt, friend's boyfriend or mother, tenant who rents my house, the shop who delivers butane, etc.

Given that we are discussing LinkedIn, wouldn't you just not connect with them? Seems like a small cost for having to add that 5% of people manually.

[icebraining]

There is no such thing as "just not connect with them". Once it gets an address, LI will hound you and them, trying to convince them to signup and connect (they even lost a lawsuit over this), and then they'll leak the contacts for every other criminal to abuse them.

Yeah, I'll manually add a few people to avoid imposing that on myself and others.