I agree, I think LinkedIn's value for network participants is very low. For someone trying to find information it is even lower. The one useful thing I see from it now is that it helps confirm someone's claim that they worked somewhere; through checking of people in their network.
However, things like promoting of skills, constant 'do you know ...' emails, and other meaningless profile building tasks that results in engagement with the website, appears to be little more than an exercise in cheap self promotion.
Perhaps I'm not the intended audience, but I find that marketing types tend to be the most active users on LinkedIn. What that says about the nature of the service, I'm not too sure at this point.
I can only agree. Specifically, their job recommendations repeatedly insisted (until I finally got around to muting them) that because I'd had a job in a particular city some years ago, clearly that made me an ideal match for positions in entirely different fields.
Seriously, if your company's raison d'etre is employment, and you're giving equivilancy to a long-ago location as to someone's actual field of expertise.. I'm, generously, hoping things improve.
For many people, jobhunting can be a soul-crushingly tedious, utterly unrewarding experience, and LinkedIn's seemingly unaware and uninterested, preferring self promotion with all the inerrant accuracy of AdWords.
OK but once you're in already, and you aren't connecting your address book (hmm, what else are they going to do with it?) what sucks about LinkedIn so much relative to other social networks?
But it is the very definition of a network effect - I think competing with it is a hiding to nothing - I suspect that the best approach is to commoditise it - one of its plugins will become so popular that it essentially takes over simply using the LinkedIn API as a convenient backend
However, things like promoting of skills, constant 'do you know ...' emails, and other meaningless profile building tasks that results in engagement with the website, appears to be little more than an exercise in cheap self promotion.
Perhaps I'm not the intended audience, but I find that marketing types tend to be the most active users on LinkedIn. What that says about the nature of the service, I'm not too sure at this point.