Comments on: Why I “Cleaned House” on LinkedIn – When Less is More

By: Keane

Keane — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 00:36:14 +0000

Excellent post. I totally agree. Luckily, that is not a problem I will have anytime soon!

Keane
keane.festizio.net

By: Your Digital Friends: Less is More| Zoli’s Blog

Your Digital Friends: Less is More| Zoli’s Blog — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 18:03:56 +0000

[...] almost two years ago that I “cleaned house” at LinkedIn, dropping from 500+ connections to about [...]

By: Zoli Erdos

Zoli Erdos — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 15:57:26 +0000

I’ve just discovered that you can now break a link yourself, and don’t need any excuse, the other person will not be notified, you just disappear from his/her list.

This is definitely new to me, previously you had to email customer service to break a link.

By: Anshu Sharma

Anshu Sharma — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 07:45:34 +0000

LinkedIn could die out like some of the early social networking places if they don’t help users keep a healthy network. I wish LinkedIn gave me some good reasons (excuses) to bow out of certain links without offending people. One way would be for the links to automatically expire unless either party renews it, say every 6 months. After all, that’s how networking in real life evolves, if I don’t talk to you for many months or years, we loose touch. The same should apply to endorsements and references.

People that cannot forget go insane. Could that be true in cyberspace too?

By: J.C. Payne

J.C. Payne — Fri, 12 May 2006 22:47:13 +0000

I am fairly new to LinkedIn, and far from being a ’superconnector,’ so as I learning how to properly use LinkedIn, the more I grow to prefer it to other social networking sites, especially the ones that are more about being social than truly making connections. To create a controlled list of professional contacts from which I actually make contact is important to me, and not just a wild spread chain of completely unrelated unknowns.

By: Zoli Erdos

Zoli Erdos — Mon, 08 May 2006 14:39:08 +0000

I like the “people to keep tabs on” option – currently I have a few who I met, but only once and only randomly by being seated at the same table at a conference. A courtesy business-card exchange does not make us “connections” on LinkedIn, but I did not want them to feel I was rude rejecting them – so they are now pending as unanswered….

That said, the new option will likely be debated by some, as a way to introduce a “caste system” in LinkedIn ..

By: Konstantin Guericke

Konstantin Guericke — Mon, 08 May 2006 08:17:10 +0000

I’m glad you right-sized. I believe strongly that LinkedIn works best when you are connected to just the people you truly are willing to recommend and who know you well enough to give you a strong recommendation when you ask to be introduced to one of their contacts (or someone one of their contacts knows).

There are two reasons we don’t yet have the “disconnect” in the UI. One, I think ill-will can get created when people accept on a trial basis and then just as easily disconnect. We want people to be careful who to accept in the first place (though I understand perfectly that you just didn’t want to be rude). Second, we know there are “shades of grey” in professional relationships. The person who contacted you may be completely “black”, meaning you don’t want any relationship. Or he may be “grey”, as in someone you had a nice conversation with at a conference, but you don’t feel you know the person well enough to make an introduction for.

So, we will likely introduce “disconnect” when we also provide options like “downgrade.” When there is no real relationship to begin with, people will disconnect (as they do now), but we’re pretty certain people will also do more spring cleaning with their connections and just keep their strongest contacts at the “connection” level when they have an option to re-classify some of their current connections as “people to keep tabs on.”