[dkarapetyan]

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.

[peteretep]

    > I don't know about you but if there was some other
    > network for professionals to showcase profiles I would
    > jump on that immediately

XING?

[hrvbr]

Viadeo is more popular in France.

[ldng]

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.

[dkarapetyan]

Neat. Why is it limited to Germany?

[Mithaldu]

Full disclosure: I'm a german web developer.

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.

[czottmann]

AFAIK, it's actually a Rails shop these days. (I know people who work there.)

[peteretep]

    > Neat. Why is it limited to Germany?

It's ... not?

[logicallee]

>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?

[peteretep]

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.

[dkarapetyan]

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.

[onedev]

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.

[click170]

I agree with everything except for actually advising people to sign up.

I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemies. Or the friends of my enemies.

[Gmo]

As mentioned elsewhere, there is Viadeo.