Well, I know a lot of you are involved in using LinkedIn, in part because
I'm personally linked to many of you, and in part because you're savvy
professionals that know how the world works.

Here are some observations I've made about the good, bad and ugly of LinkedIn

Good 

- If you invite people that know you, they respond quickly
- You can expand your personal/professional network through this
- It's free... but that sort of comes with a price
- There are a lot of groups you can join

Bad

- You need to check the e-mail address people use, because some of them are
not legit (case in point, one I had yesterday was to a Listserv!)
- Lots of people are registered twice, but you can't tell that one may be a
personal account and one a professional account
- People forgot they had an account and they set up one, two, or three more =)
- People don't check their LinkedIn accounts and invitations sit there for a
year or more unanswered
- People setup accounts, forget about them, change e-mail addresses and
invitations bounce (forgot to change e-mail listed on LinkedIn)
- There's no easy way to know if you have pending invitations (that you sent
to others) because it's not indicated in your Imported Contacts list
- The groups aren't well managed and there are a lot of similar ones

Ugly

- LinkedIn doesn't tell you that you already have someone in your Contacts
or that you've already sent an invite to someone and it's pending, it's been
declined, or it bounced
- Your Contacts aren't highlighted in your Imported Contacts list (which can
result in sending an invite to someone already in your list)
- No matter how many times you invite someone that says they "don't know"
you, they won't accept your invitation =)


Other

- You can sure waste a lot of time building a Network!
- There are a ton of people named "Steve" in MY network
- Even people that know you WELL ignore your invites sometimes for more than
a YEAR (thanks DOUG!)

Do others have some thoughts on how well this works for them?  One other
thing I've noticed is "customer service" is sure slow about responding to
questions about how things function... like how do you rearrange the order
of items listed in your 'current" job history.

Larry

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