I was never much of a social conformist
Posted in Commentary on October 25th, 2006 by Sacha PeterI’ve removed my profile from LinkedIn, primarily for the same reasons that I don’t have my profile in any other social networking site (I used to have one on Friendster).
I was also getting mildly concerned with respect to the signal-to-noise ratio on the site – due to the minority game effect, such sites will become increasingly less effective as the majority flock toward the service. Although the network effect will improve the quality of the social networking aspect, the original intent, a superior job placement service, will be totally lost in the noise just like how applying for positions on Monster.com is a totally futile exercise. Eventually they’ll have to deviate from their original business purpose and start spamming people to buy profiles that will enable them to see extra job information of candidates, etc. I refuse to be part of it, so I’m getting my profile removed from the system.
This weblog and being able to find my name #1 on a Google search is my social networking tool. Nothing else is needed other than to tell people to “find my name on Google”. In fact I’m even on the first page of search matches if you type in Sacha, nearly behind the awesomely funny comic, Sacha Baron Cohen.
From the perspective of people being able to find you, I think you are dead on. However, you have limited your ability to maintain contact with people that you aren’t socially active with.
My #1 goal with LinkedIn is to be able to get current contact information for past co-workers that I am unlikely to communicate with unless I am trying to recruit them.