I knew I had read news about how popular LinkedIn is becoming, and when I searched just now one of the top results was this blog entry titled, Networking on steroids: LinkedIn growing in popularity. Marilynn Mobley expressed some of the same feelings I have been having about dealing with link requests from people you don’t really know:
It strikes me as irrelevant to connect to someone I’ve never heard of who happened to find me using a keyword search. The way I see it, my connections aren’t relevant to me – or others – if I can’t personally speak to why I’m connected to them.
Furthermore, I think she’s right on target when she says,
I suppose it’s possible that some people actually know – and can credibly introduce – hundreds or even thousands of people, but frankly, when I see people with so many connections, I automatically raise an eyebrow.
She’s harsher than I am about what she thinks of them, though I bet her term (“Link Ho’s”) probably does fit some people!
Back to my original question that I was searching to answer, one of her links took me to a news story citing more than 9 million LinkedIn members and 350 corporate customers — but that the news story is a year old. Another figure, from April 2007, is in this report on LinkedIntelligence, citing a LinkedIn press release, which says there are 10 million users on LinkedIn. So, I am not sure how many there actually are now, but it’s an awful lot. Read the rest of this entry »
