I’ve been avoiding the Facebook and MySpace crowd since its inception – I didn’t want to be the thirty-something, dirty old man on the barstool of a teenie/twenty-sonething nightclub. However, about the time of the relaunch of AustralianBlogs (or thereabouts) Simone sent me a LinkedIn invitation. I must have signed up a little while ago as it’s fallen by the wayside like my hotmail account. So I gave i a whirl – accepted Simone’s kind invitation to link up and dusted off the resume. This time around, I pasted a link on this blog (as you can see on the top right-hand corner).
It’s terribly uncool to the digerati, I’m sure. LinkedIn’s up there with Amazon, eBay and Yahoo as the giants of the first go-around of the internet boom.
So I thought…PERFECT.
Positives
- good for finding long lost friends
- acts as an online business card or whitepages listing
- might help personal ‘trustrank’
- nice to see the track record
Negatives
- a bit narcissistic – and you do feel like a tosser
- privacy – you can’t control who sees your profile and what they do with it
- can’t hide the bad bits – think of it as web cellulite
Overall, I’ve added 30-odd friends (real friends) and a couple of acquaintances from the blog world. Not bad. The greatest tangible benefit has really been hooking up with long-lost friends but I guess it’s been some help with any interested surfers looking to get involved with AustralianBlogs.
Lol, I don’t remember doing that, and don’t actually use it myself… but then, I’m a twenty-something who is on myspace and facebook 😀
If you’re looking to find long lost friends, I would recommend facebook for that (one of the few things it’s good for… the other is playing scrabble 😀 )
Anyway, look forward to chatting at Podcamp, and thanks for all the link love recently!