Always happy to share, but be careful what you wish for. You get that NDA on you, and then there is less fun to be had. :)

Feel free to reach out to Mario or myself anytime.
Adam

Everyone else- that’s how cool LinkedIn is. They swing by blogs and indulge my silly misunderstandings.

Adam – Brief me, baby. Share the strategy. I want to sing.

Saw this post today, and just wanted to clarify a few things. To be clear, the presentation at GSP East was not intended as an end-to-end walkthrough of the LinkedIn strategy or opportunity. The conference was specifically geared towards social media, so the presentation was specifically about LinkedIn and it’s relevance for advertising and as an application platform.

So, to make sure I answer your last question:

“Chris, this is just one stop on the way to application greatness, and not the plan.”

I hope that you will be both surprised & delighted with a number of the enhancements we plan for LinkedIn. It’s just the beginning.

Hope this helps,
Adam

For the past two months (once I passed the 3,500 mark), I started getting error messages while performing the most mundane of tasks. I’ve heard from others with large networks that LI says its because of the size of our networks – so basically, we are at fault!

There has been a growing thread on the Yahoo! LIONs group that dissects the issues and also proposes numerous solutions.

LI is my favorite social networking site because it is for professionals. There is so much potential there. I’d hate to see them go the way of Friendster. Increased advertising is not one of them.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar’s_number

Just curious, how many people are in your total LI network? I’ve got about 200 direct connections. (I appreciate you being one of them.) LI says I’m connected to 2,344,600+ professionals. Wondering how this compares.

Although it is my favorite networking platform, I also share many of the views expressed here and I love the idea of making verification easier. Not too sure about paying for it though. A means of verification of pro credentials seems like a reasonable baseline feature to expect (otherwise, doesn’t this become just another prospecting list for spammers & recruiters at some point?).

Also, my comment on your earlier post was something to the effect of “The best way to improve LI is to just stave off the sucky features of other social networks”.

Maybe that wasn’t clear enough, how about this: “Don’t sell out and make it an ad platform.”

Or this: “Please don’t invite every pasty-faced code jockey to exploit the rich data supplied by your users. Be a little selective and make it about the *user* experience.”

It’s great to build a kick-a## service, and it’s wonderful to see it grow. But those two things happen by different mechanisms: the founders do the building, but the users are responsible for the growth.

Maybe LI doesn’t remember what it was like before they were “bigger than Sweden”. I actually read that, or some similar statement, in one of their tag lines. Imagine how inferior that must make Sweden feel. Heck, if they are bigger than Sweden maybe they can buy Yahoo! and incorporate Flickr, Upcoming, etc.

Oops my sarcastic evil twin came out. It really is my favorite, so I shouldn’t bash.

Regardless of LI developments, I hope you do go ahead with your idea of building a professional network and migrating your contacts over. I’m with you whenever you do. Why? Because based on what I’ve seen, you understand value creation for the user, you are guided by a desire for ever improving quality, and you seem hesitant to exploit trust relationships. There are lots of great possibilities with this!