Social networking sites in general only grow through this type of spamming. Facebook was one of the worst offenders in its early days - Hotmail even blocked their invite messages for a substantial period of time. It is no coincidence that many of the sites that use the contact-list/auto-invite feature most aggressively have grown the fastest. Although we might find it objectionable, apparently most users either don't object to it or don't realize that it even happened (my guess would be that hundreds of millions of FB/LI users fall into the latter category).
LinkedIn is a Virus
31–40 of 113 posts
Re: LinkedIn is a Virus
#32I'd point a finger not at LNKD but at GOOG for not having better a better security impl in gmail. If anyone can send an email that requires just one click in it to peruse and use your contacts list, that is a bug. Any 3rd party should need to formally request access to resources like a contacts list, and the user should be clearly prompted by the GOOG platform to approve/deny the request.
Re: LinkedIn is a Virus
#33There is surprise when an address book with over 1000 entries is voluntarily connected to a commercial service designed to link people together?
Surprise when closing a browser tab does not stop the request from running at LinkedIn?
Calling it a virus is disingenuous at best.
Edit: ... or a way to get page views.
Re: LinkedIn is a Virus
#34My version: I was on the iPad, somehow hit a link to send invites to everyone on my "you might know" list. Much embarassment ensued. Surprisingly, about 75% of people who I've never met (online or IRL) accepted the invite. I'm not exactly sure why Linkedin is worth a damn anymore.
That explains why $random people I've never met send me connect invites. I normally ignore them, but still waste time trying to figure out if its important or not. -.-. Can one safely ignore all these "Business" networks? Wonder what people get out of it.
Mostly the random invites I get are from recruiters or the like, who want a big list of people to try and recruit/spam.
Re: LinkedIn is a Virus
#35I'd point a finger not at LNKD but at GOOG for not having better a better security impl in gmail. If anyone can send an email that requires just one click in it to peruse and use your contacts list, that is a bug. Any 3rd party should need to formally request access to resources like a contacts list, and the user should be clearly prompted by the GOOG platform to approve/deny the request.
It does require authorization. You have to connect your Google account to Linked In in order for this to happen and Google has a one-click authorization process with which to do that.
Re: LinkedIn is a Virus
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the lack of warning + the worse part is LinkedIn will send you 3 requests until you join...
I've never seen the value in joining LinkedIn, but the endless requests used to annoy me, so I tried to unsubscribe. But you can't. In the end, I wrote to them and told them to put me on their Do Not Contact list. That's worked pretty well: I haven't heard a peep in years!
I click on "report spam" every frigging time I get an unsolicited email from them. I hope that one day Google starts recognizing them as spammers and I contributed a little.
Re: LinkedIn is a Virus
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
LinkedIn was designed to clone myspace, but for grownups instead of high school kids. It's essentially myspace for realtors.
I've found linkedin to be massively useful when looking for new contracts. I'm a contractor based in the UK.
any tips you could give?
Re: LinkedIn is a Virus
#38There is surprise when an address book with over 1000 entries is voluntarily connected to a commercial service designed to link people together? Surprise when closing a browser tab does not stop the request from running at LinkedIn? Calling it a virus is disingenuous at best. Edit: ... or a way to get page views.
This, this. Much of our Western culture is centered around the individual and their ideas which must be respected, no matter how ridiculous it sounds, if it's someone wearing hipster glasses.
Re: LinkedIn is a Virus
#39I've always hated LinkedIn but recently it seems to actually have people talking to each other in forum-style threads, which actually makes it a bit more useful.
Re: LinkedIn is a Virus
#40Rule 1: Make sure your linkedin password is not the same as your gmail password. I've tried to login to linkedin a couple of times in too much of a hurry, thinking I was logging into linkedin from some request and not reading the actual page. Luckily my passwords are different. I'd have to say I'm not sure how someone who is tech savvy can knowingly give a company their gmail account info and expect nothing bad to ha…
A lot of those websites scan your address book and show you people that are already on the site and then ask you to send emails to people who aren't. It's reasonable to not know that 11,000 people would be on linked in. Also Linkedin isn't exactly a website that he "wasn't sure about". Everyone knows what the site is and does. Also your Rule 1 is kinda silly. I guess as long as I keep the passwords to those to sites different then I should be safe?