LinkedIn: A case of sucking so bad, you must be doing something right

My friend, Om Malik, has written a personal rant about LinkedIn, where he concludes that between the lack of utility, email spam and asocial nature of what is positioned as a "business social network," he's had enough, and shut down his account.

First off, I totally agree with everything Om says. I hate the spam. I resent the fact that once it becomes clear that a contact is becoming a spammer, that LinkedIn makes it difficult to threshold them.

And of course, technologically, LinkedIn is web 1.0 in terms of clunk. Just a cruddy, convoluted user experience.

Playing devil’s advocate, though, it must be serving a tangible need for a lot of users to be as successful as it is, as it is a very poor service..that I use with regularity. :-)

Put another way, LinkedIn is a case of sucking so bad, that you must be doing **something** right.

Agree? Disagree? Are there other services that fall into this bucket for you?

Comments

[Jeremy, Retailigence]

Mark: I questioned the utility at the beginning but am seeing more and more functions being added (albeit slowly).

Regarding SPAM, LinkedIn has to take much of the blame there too! After being asked dozens of times to enter my gmail account details to find other people on LinkedIn I broke down to give it a try. I was shocked when there was no step in the Wizard to customize the message and so thousands of my contacts got a generic "let's connect" message.

[VentureDeal]

Mark - a reprint of my post on Om's "rant", also relevant to your post:

While I agree that LinkedIn has its challenges, it is also starting to impress me. A few years ago I started up the “Venture Capital Group” on LinkedIn, as an experiment.

Today at 6,000 members, of which probably 10% are mainline VCs/PEs, 60% are entrepreneurs/tech executives and the remainder are probably service firm people. It’s a closed group and I monitor it closely each day and “cull” spammers or irrelevant posts.

Over time, the quality of the posts and discussions has improved. While each member has to define what is signal and what is noise to them, there was a great example recently of top-quality signal, IMO. An attorney made a post about the recent JOBS Act and how the Senate had effectively killed crowdfunding by adding a number of investor protection provisions. A great online debate/conversation ensued between a knowledgeable executive and a well-known Northeastern VC.
Here’s the text synopsis of the conversation:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PmMr2S1TgGBa87qL1mDLWpRciQ2F8ciSRVK6I7Qrt4I/edit

I’ve seen no other online equivalent of that kind of debate. Haven’t seen it on Facebook, tech blog or any other social network, at least not all included in one convenient location. And while most of the conversations in the Venture Capital Group are not as detailed and informative, its a step in the right direction.

Cheers

[Mark Sigal]

@VentureDeal, great color on the topic, and great specifics. I, too, have seen quality exercise of topics in select groups (ebook-related in my case), so that point rings true.

Best,

Mark

[Mark Sigal]

@Jeremy, I think part of the generic message is an intent to avoid the contact process from feeling like direct marketing, but it's also consistent with the sterile, almost stilted quality of the service. I would also say that virtually every service added to LinkedIn has a poor quality, poor integration feel to it, which I guess I just don't get why need be the case. It's not exponentially more expensive or complex to do things right than do just pick off check box items. I appreciate the thoughts.

Cheers,

Mark