that’s whacked

a rant on social network dilution

Monday, Jul 16. 2007  –  Category: Musings

I stumbled across TopLinked.com, a site listing the top linked people on LinkedIn this morning.

Am I the only person who finds this sort of dilution of social networking annoying? It’s the reason I stopped using Orkut, Friendster, and all the other gazillions of social networking sites. LinkedIn is the one site I continue to actually use because of the value of professional networking; but this value is derived from what I thought was from an actual network.

People with thousands of connections and notes like “(accept all invitations)” are pointless. What value are they adding to the network? Clearly they can’t actually professionally (or even personally) vouch for everyone. If I meet someone who is connected to one of my friends (who actually maintains a proper known network on LinkedIn) then I know there is some value in that connection. I know I can talk to my friend who can vouch for that person (or maybe they won’t vouch for them - either way the information is useful to have). What can I derive from seeing someone who is a 2nd degree connection through someone else who has 20,000 connections? Absolutely nothing. They can’t tell me anything since they don’t know anything. Their node in the social network quickly becomes “fluff”…. it’s the equivalent of the highly connected MacArthur Maze of highway junctions: it’s inevitable that you will have to pass through it at some point, but you’ll hate it and curse aloud the time you spend there.