[gumby]

I always look someone up by LinkedIn before meeting them. Usually people do the same for me. It's a good way to see who you know in common (better than Facebook on a business level) and in general saves a lot of time. Almost everyone I meet for work has a linkedin profile -- though literally just yesterday I (independently) met two people without a linkedin profile: one a quasi-celeb and the other someone simply so specialized in skill and so appropriately connected that it just didn't add value for him.

Now there are drawbacks to linkedin. For example some people will link to just anyone. I only link to people whom I actually know well enough personally to have a good opinion about them.

The linked in interface is terrible. It generates too many messages and basically just sucks. They know, and it sometimes improves, but there you are.

You will get recruiter and other spam. But then again the whole point of it is to connect people professionally, so...

[Turing_Machine]

"It generates too many messages and basically just sucks."

Yep. That's why I closed my LI account -- it was part of a process aimed at reducing my inbox load. Yes, I had them filtered into their own folder, but it still used up space and increased cognitive load to deal with them...and if you're not going to deal with them (say, by sending them directly to the trash), what's the point?

[socket0]

I like looking people up before a meeting as well, just to get a measure of how technical they are, what their backgrounds are, etc. But I hate that LinkedIn tells them I've been looking, at least when I use the free version. It sounds reasonable to do some prep work before a meeting, but gets decidedly more creepy when you get e-mail to tell you that someone was checking up on you.

[jonathankoren]

Its a reciprocal setting. If you want to know who looks at you, you have to show who you are.

Why is it creepy that someone you're having a meeting with looks you up? Sounds perfectly appropriate to me.