I signed up with LinkedIn a long time ago, and tend to not pay much attention to it until I receive an invite, which inevitably gets me to browse link trees finding other contacts I may know. Thus far, my only business use for LinkedIn has been routing requests from individuals who want to contact others at Adobe (and Macromedia previously). I have tried to use LinkedIn to find contacts that I needed, but thus far those attempts were rather unsuccessful.
What I have not really figured out is who to accept link requests from. I have dozens of link requests from people I have never heard of, and many more from names that are familiar but whom I really don't know well enough to recommend, route requests to, or anything else. So, do I add these as links? My gut feel is not, but I don't decline them either (I did once, way back when, and apparently really insulted someone), so they just sit there as pending invites which is neither here nor there.
Either way, this recent post by Guy Kawasaki (and the comments posted) has prompted me to take another look at LinkedIn.
The amount of time it takes to write a recommendation is also what drives this "acception scrutiny"; since I don't have time to write recomendations about all the people I know, I instead scrutinize who I invite into my network. I understand Guy's points about visibility, but... you're never sorry for something you didn't say. Therefore, it's better to ignore a request from someone your not familiar with vs. accepting them, then later wondering why, and removing them. No answer seems the less evil compared to acceptance, than later reversal rejection.
As far as LinkedIn... I think your experience matches mine nearly identically... I accept those people that I know (never received one I didn't know)... I snoop around at who they have in their network... I have never invited anyone... I did write one sincere recommendation that did nothing except make me wonder if that person was planning to switch jobs. The only way I judge people via LinkedIn is to think those who have a TON of contacts are like the "soches" in high school. I don't look down on such people, but I just think they're REALLY into it.
I do fear that some people use LinkedIn to avoid the inevitable--making personal contacts (even "personal" via email or the phone) in order to get jobs. "People Hire People" so I suppose if it gets you closer to actually interacting with a person then it's fine. For me, it's mainly an anonymous experience.
I added a custom messsage to my, "who should connect" part.
"If I don't know you, or never worked with you, don't attempt to connect to me, or ask for a connection. I can't in good faith recommend someone I never met or worked with. Just because we worked at the same company does not mean I know you or can say good things about you."
My requests have dropped a little. Mostly I just ignore requests now from people I can't honestly say I would recommend.
Linked in is (to me) teetering on the edge of useful or lame. People are using it like college kids use facebook, and 12 year olds use myspace.
The idea, really, is that people you know are in your immediate group, so the people they know are sort of "pre-vetted" to one degree or another, because the assumption is that they know them personally as well. If you have people in your group that you trust, and others do as well, it can work as the opposite of a "Do Not Hire" list and give you access to people you wouldn't have access to otherwise.
That said, it's obvious that "nothing's perfect" applies to this most of all. ;)
J
Like Ben, I've received a lot of invitations (before I joined) and requests for connection (since I've joined) from folks I haven't always recognized. I don't respond to those I don't know. I may go back and review them and send an email asking for more info.
One thing I'll share that could also explain this is that there is a feature, which I just used today for the first time, which can have it look at your Outlook contacts and identify which folks are already in LinkedIn to send them connect requests (or send invites to those in your contacts who are not found on LinkedIn). Some folks may use THAT mechanism and then send a blast email to all on that list. I didn't do that. Rather, I looked at each person that it found and I decided if they're someone who I know.
I suppose an interesting challenge with all this is that we don't know for sure whether who else is being so careful. To a degree, it may not matter. It does seem that the goal is to widen your network, for whatever benefits. Like Ben, I've printed out the Kawasaki article to read and see what I may be missing. I'll re-evaluate LinkedIn after a few months. For now, I'm just expanding my network. If we know each other, feel free to connect. :-)
Hey Ben, how about toning down that crazy Captcha. :-) It took me a couple tries to get it right. See my blog entries on how easy that is to do (in the Lyla captcha underlying BlogCFC) at http://carehart.org/blog/client/index.cfm/captchas....
Personally, I only link people I know and/or have worked with and don't mind the world knowing I'm associated with. One might say that the list of people you link to says almost as much about you as who you are.
We'll see.