It's called monetizing. Eventually all the free services do it.
No, it's called being viral. Monetizing is when you get spam from people you're not connected to (a.k.a. InMail)...
Hey LinkedIn – Nobody Wants This
21–30 of 38 posts
Re: Hey LinkedIn – Nobody Wants This
#22The CEO of a company I worked for did this by accident: Invited all of his contact. Let me tell you, all the underlings and vendors were so excited to get an invitation from the CEO. His linked in profile exploded. I was tasked with trying to uninvite the 500 or so people that hadn't accepted in the first few hours! I eventually told him it was no big deal. LinkedIn isn't very personal, it's mostly image.
That's kind of interesting. Why were they so excited to get his invite and why was he so worried about managing his connections? (Ie uninviting people.) Curious to understand the behavior.
Re: Hey LinkedIn – Nobody Wants This
#23Contact scraping is the only thing keeping social media going. I say let it die.
Re: Hey LinkedIn – Nobody Wants This
#24The CEO of a company I worked for did this by accident: Invited all of his contact. Let me tell you, all the underlings and vendors were so excited to get an invitation from the CEO. His linked in profile exploded. I was tasked with trying to uninvite the 500 or so people that hadn't accepted in the first few hours! I eventually told him it was no big deal. LinkedIn isn't very personal, it's mostly image.
For me it is personal. I mainly use it as my contact database. If I ever want to get in touch with an old colleague, I can find their address there (kept up to data by them). Plus, I know what they are up to (status updates when they switch jobs etc).
Plus, if I check out a company, I can easily see who I know that works there. All good things.
That's why I don't want random people as my contacts - it messes all of the above up. I wrote a bit more on the pros and cons of LinkedIn as I see it: http://henrikwarne.com/2013/08/21/linkedin-good-or-bad/
Re: Hey LinkedIn – Nobody Wants This
#25I have never had a LinkedIn and I just counted 213 LinkedIn messages in my gmail account (yes, I am horrible at deleting emails). Their email spamming has turned me off to ever trying LinkedIn. Do people actually find LinkedIn useful anyway? Everyone I know has an account, but I have never actually met a person who has found a job through using the site.
>Do people actually find LinkedIn useful anyway?
It's great for finding out when people you know are looking for a job. You start receiving recommendation/endorsement requests.
Re: Hey LinkedIn – Nobody Wants This
#26I have never had a LinkedIn and I just counted 213 LinkedIn messages in my gmail account (yes, I am horrible at deleting emails). Their email spamming has turned me off to ever trying LinkedIn. Do people actually find LinkedIn useful anyway? Everyone I know has an account, but I have never actually met a person who has found a job through using the site.
I actually find it pretty useful. I've used it to cold call people in different companies and functional roles just to pick their brains, people are surprisingly open to it.
Also, it's helpful as a contact database when a former colleague changes their email address/phone number.
The "request an intro" is pretty good to just to see how you're connected. If you know someone in common with a person it tends to lower the barrier of a cold call.
Note: by cold call I don't mean selling, just getting a chance to talk to someone interesting; i.e. you see an interesting role and want to get the real deal about a company
Re: Hey LinkedIn – Nobody Wants This
#27The moment a service linked Linkedin or Facebook tries to connect to your Google or Yahoo account, there should be a big glaring red pop-up listing the horrors in store ... and how some of the damage is irreversible. It'll haunt you for ages as someone else said in another comment.
Re: Hey LinkedIn – Nobody Wants This
#28Whoa thats a lot of traffic. I just beefed up the server! Sorry for the 500 errors!
Your server would have handled it fine if your WordPress install had some basic performance tuning.
Read http://browserdiet.com/ or http://blog.newrelic.com/2013/02/07/web-performance-optimiza...
Re: Hey LinkedIn – Nobody Wants This
#29This sleazy behavior is exactly why I refuse to use LinkedIn.
Re: Hey LinkedIn – Nobody Wants This
#30Everyone does this. By now, I consider it an industry "best practice" and no one should be surprised. Is it still reprehensible? Sure, but then again, every startup that has ever grown their user base has used some variation of this "growth hack".
I wish that I had the ability to downvote people because of comments like this. There is no justification for that kind of behavior -- and calling it a "best practice" speaks volumes about your lack of integrity.