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LinkedIn more popular than Twitter (according to LinkedIn?)

When I log into LinkedIn, I now receive 3 pages of spam. That spam is “every tweet by every person I’ve ever met”.

Somewhere, buried inside the avalanche of spam, are a few genuine LinkedIn messages. e.g. today I saw that a friend had moved to a new company – important, useful information.

Support: why would you want to refuse our spam?

I asked the LinkedIn customer support folks how to disable the spam. Their response:

You can “only hide the member’s Twitter updates [if you] also [hide all] their LinkedIn updates”.

i.e. your choices are:

  1. Get spam
  2. Get nothing

Hmm. Think about the people with tens of thousands of connections on linkedin. Their linkedin home pages must be absurdly high spam-to-signal ratio.

LinkedIn’s management: Twitter? WTF is Twitter?

LinkedIn’s CTO / lead architect / whoever authorized this stupid setup apparently “forgot” that the main feature of Twitter is it *allows* you to choose the people you receive tweets from.

(or, more likely, they’ve never used Twitter – it’s just a buzzword they’d heard of from a VC)

LinkedIn removes that choice. It simply forces everything on you. No filtering. No choices. Nothing. As a user, you exist to be spammed.

As a user, you exist to consume LinkedIn’s adverts, and nothing else. The site is – it would seem – not intended to be useful.

RIP LinkedIn.com

For a business to sink to such a low level of utility, and for the management to achieve such a high level of ignorance about the market, suggests to me that LI is moving rapidly towards implosion. I don’t believe it will still be with us two years from now. And that’s rather tragic, given how valuable it used to be.

6 replies on “LinkedIn more popular than Twitter (according to LinkedIn?)”

Unlink your Twitter account from LinkedIn? I don’t have mine linked, and don’t see any twitter spam at all.

It’s not necessarily that they are forgetting the right lessons from Twitter, it could just be that they are learning all of the wrong lessons from Facebook. I’m eagerly anticipating the day that Facebook repents or implodes on being so much of an “opt-out” website rather than “opt-in”… I’m not sure that it is coming, unfortunately, and in the meanwhile everyone else seems to be following them blindly.

“Luckily”, for me, I can still rely on the weekly summaries to mostly keep me informed about my contacts, but that’s probably just because my connections list is somewhat meager and rather unfortunately mostly immobile in the current economy, or so it would seem.

It’s not *MY* Twitter account

It’s EVERYONE ELSE’s Twitter accounts – each person is encouraged to do the linking, and once they do, LinkedIn then spams every tweet from YOU to EVERYONE on your LinkedIn contacts list.

Well, I know several of my contacts use twitter and have linked it to their LinkedIn account, but I’m simply not seeing ANY twitter updates. Hence my suggestion, if it was perhaps tied to your twitter account being linked…

(I know I haven’t altered any twitter-related settings to do with LinkedIn, so..)

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