Making sense of linkedin.com
I expected this site would be somewhat like classmates.com or reunion.com (I'll admit those are the only quasi-social networking sites that I visit. I don't do myspace or facebook.) The main page of linkedin.com is fairly simple, and sure enough it told me that over 30,000 Sun Micro employees were registered, and some others from companies I've worked at in the past.
So far so good, but I had some problems creating a profile because my address books don't exist in any of the 3 choices they give you. Actually, I don't even have all of the contacts I'd like to add in any one address book. I've been stymied so far because I assumed that SOMEWHERE there would be an option to import email addresses some other way. And I finally found it: the "import contacts" tab has a link to import a .csv file there. But wait! it doesn't seem to read anything but a .csv file from Outlook, ACT!, Palm and a few others. When I tried to import a .csv file I made myself by doing a "save as" in OpenOffice Calc, it said "Sorry, we were unable to parse your contacts". I looked all over the FAQ to see if there was any further info on how to do this, but I came up with zip. I'm assuming that all I'd need is the actual format of the .csv file or is the import function smart enough to know that it's not actually outputted from an "approved" address book. Or perhaps not?
thanx
Posted by Game on March 16, 2008 at 11:57 AM EDT #
good articles good luck
Posted by Nameless on March 16, 2008 at 11:57 AM EDT #
I consider it bad etiquette for folks to upload their address books to any of these sites, like linkedin, plaxo, spock, etc. and then blanket their contacts with invite requests. It's good for the site, of course, since they get more registrations that way, but it's bad for your contacts: they get p*ssed and turned off by all the invite spam.
Linkedin is a valuable tool, especially for finding colleagues from previous companies. Build up linkages slowly and manually vs. using the mass-market mailing approach.
Posted by Pete on March 16, 2008 at 12:34 PM EDT #
Pete, I understand your concern b/c I've heard it from my colleagues. However all I'm trying to do is register for the darn site and it apparently is not completed until I put something in the contacts. Are you saying that just the act of importing any addresses will produce "invite spam"? In that case, I think I'll pass on linkedin completely.
Posted by ML Starkey on March 17, 2008 at 05:56 AM EDT #
Hello ML,
If Linkedin is requiring an import of contacts, that is certainly different from when I signed up a few years ago. Yeah, I'd imagine that LinkedIn would want to send invites to your contact list, once it got sucked in. But again, hopefully you should be able to register without ever doing an import.
Posted by Pete on March 17, 2008 at 07:47 PM EDT #