LinkedIn, Social Networking or an Addiction?

Last year a collegue from the OSGi asked me to join LinkedIn. The invitation text was very spammy and I did not go for it. A good friend also invited me with the default text and it was effectively assisinated by my spam filter. However, he was more stubborn and asked me why I did not join, so I did.

When I looked into it, it was kind of intriguing. The idea is that you find contacts-of-contacts but can only contact them through referrals. There is thus no danger that your email address is easily harvested by a spammer, actually, the site seems to be very careful not to leak information of other persons except the information you want to make available.

The site is not that big yet, but it isinteresting to see how a few contacts away you are from many, many people. I just invited many of my contacts and it is addictive to see how they sign up and surprising to see how many were already in there. The original collegue who invited me a year ago, was from the OSGi and this has created an inner circle of OSGi people to be out there.

It is hard to start doing real work when the responses of the invitations start to trickle in. I guess this is the stuff that the brothers of the freemasons must have felt. Or maybe it just feels like a harmless pyramid game.

I have to stop now, I have to urgently get my fix and see if more people accepted my invitation :-)

  Peter Kriens

posted by Peter @ Monday, February 23, 2004