LimitedIn
Alan Levine aka CogDog barked this February 2nd, 2007 11:26 pm
After a few more days following my foray into two social network apps, I have a completely, non-scientific, suspect, un-analytical conclusion no one should take seriously.
Twitter is a heck of a lot more fun and gratifying than LinkedIn. I’ve heard the comments, and accept them as true for them, that people get a lot of value in professional connections via LinkedIn. It feels, so much more…. mature.. than what Twitter is, an ADD prone kids game. Right?
I’ve spent a lot more time deleting or clicking on links in my LinkedIn invitations, while to twitter takes about 5 seconds via my chat client. I’ve made 24 “connections” in LinkedIn, though 5 have yet to respond. I’ve got 11 friends linked in twitter, quite a few of them publicly cursing me for blogging about it. Heh.
What I’ve found clunky in LinkedIn, besides my moans and groans about what it takes to add contacts is that it very much limits your relationships with colleagues to ones associated with a particular job. I got one of those nice recommendations from a friend in Victoria, yet in returning it to write a recommendation, I had to choose to do so within the context of one of his listed positions. LinkedIn assumes that the only professional connections we make are tied to our job titles yet my most important ones have been in the context of informal collaborations, or open source projects, or things that are blurred outside the box of my job title, maybe it is a twitter buddy.
In what context can I recommend Scott’s abilities to create really bizarre audio mashups at house parties? Maybe he’d rather not have that known 
I’m sounding nitpicky, but LinkedIn makes me feel ClosedIn, like I am defined by my job. Twitter is just a fun playground.
But you know what is bound to happen– in a little amount of time I will likely use neither.
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February 5th, 2007 at 7:31 pm
sweet googly googly. Linked In has done everything they could to block the process of creating links. I have to look up the email address for someone that’s already in the system? WTF? What a stupid decision that is. Flickr Friends are much easier to make. My del.icio.us network is easier to manage. And neither of those tools use those links as the single reason to use the site. LinkedIn really needs to work on their design and the workflow of actually making links…
February 7th, 2007 at 9:18 pm
Thought this might be of interest …
http://www.financialaidpodcast.com/2007/02/05/what-is-twitter/
December 30th, 2007 at 9:14 pm
[...] I’ve knocked LinkedIn around a lot in the past and remain mostly un-enamored, but give some credit for a few improvements here and there; nonetheless, the overriding reason to link in linked in is to increase the number of linkedin links one has. I’m non-plussed at social networking sites that exist for nothing more than connecting. [...]
February 2nd, 2008 at 8:56 am
[...] been a while since I barked about the clumsiness of LinkedIn but just had another one of those near deaths by lame interface design. But before that, i am still [...]