People You May Know (Linked In version)

That's the heading of a little box on my LinkedIn page (www.linkedin.com), if you have never heard of LinkedIn before, its like Facebook for business people, but with fewer photos.

Now lots of 'social networking' sites have a way of finding other people you know that you havent yet connected with. It makes sense, the more contacts you have on thier site the more traffic will increase as there is more chance of interaction. Some use you email address book for their search, others look at your history - education, work etc and even the history of some of your current contacts so that people you have something in common with are suggested as potential friends.

LinkedIn is different.

How many people do you know, let me clarify that, how many people have you met, spent some time with and remember their name? 50? 100? 200? 500? There's lots. When you stop to think about family, school friends, neighbours, work colleagues, those people you met on holiday in Tenerife and so on ... Out of those people, how many had your name or something similar (Dave Gorman need not answer this.) ? In my case - none. In your case, I'm willing to bet its less than 2 in the majority of cases.

Well, LinkedIn seem to think that despite the education and career history of thousands (#)of people on their records the best people that they can match to me all have the same name as me. Today my suggestions are Jon Allen, Jonathan Allen, Jon Allen, Jonathan Allen, Jonathan Allen, Jon Allen and Jonathan Allen all from America or Mexico and have no career connections in common with me - I program computers for a living and most of them seem to be involved with banking in some way.

LinkedIn, I say this about your friends/contacts suggestion method : its rubbish.

Now, rant over, lets see what rubbish this Monday brings me.


# - Edit - an email from LinkedIn says they have 60 Million members.