Happy birthday to LinkedIn, the biggest social network no one uses

Yesterday LinkedIn celebrated its 10th birthday — and what a precocious tween it’s turned out to be. Unless you were born to great wealth or live in abject poverty, you probably use LinkedIn. If you’re a professional and don’t have a resume on LinkedIn, you might as well not exist.

LinkedIn was one of the first companies to hire data scientists to turn its petabytes of data into products. It’s one of a handful of companies that have made the freemium/premium business model work, and it’s now “gushing profits,” according to Wired.

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Think back to 2003, if your brain cells stretch that far. The big name in social networks then was Friendster. MySpace was just starting to be noticed by people who weren’t in garage bands. Zuckerberg was a year away from stealing the idea for Facebook. Google was still mostly a search engine with a blogging platform bolted on. YouTube did not exist.

There was humble LinkedIn with its nerdy horned-rim glasses and floodwater pants, inviting us all to its boring little party in the conference room. Now some 225 million people use the network, which pulled in $325 million in revenue last quarter. LinkedIn not only survived the Facebook and Twitter onslaught, it has thrived. But it did so by sacrificing its virtue.

Creeper madness It used to be relatively hard to make a connection on LinkedIn. You had to work at the same company as someone, get introduced by a mutual connection, or be able to cough up that person’s email address. Those barriers are gone. Over the last few years LinkedIn has been flashing its ankles and cooing, “Whoo-hoo sailor, over here.”

Like Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn discovered that nudging its users to be more promiscuous with their connections was the key to rapid growth.

For example, a couple years back I connected with the lovely and charming Kristyna M., who was then media contact for an antivirus software firm in Prague. Ever since, LinkedIn has been using its People You May Know algorithm to hook me up with every Jana and Svetlana at virtually every tech company inside the former Iron Curtain.

Then there was the time I was engaging a business transaction via Gmail with a woman I had never met. (No, not that kind of transaction.) Aside from our Gmail conversation and the fact that we lived in the same state, we had nothing else in common — no shared connections anywhere, no communications on LinkedIn. She had never looked at my LinkedIn profile, nor had I looked at hers. But there she was, right at the tippy top of my People You May Know list.

Now, if I had connected my Gmail to LinkedIn, it would explain why LinkedIn picked up on this connection. But I had not connected Gmail to LinkedIn. This woman’s name and email were not in my LinkedIn contacts. LinkedIn had figured out we were connected in some other way, and when I asked the company to explain how their PYMK algorithm worked, it declined. I’ve since heard from a dozen readers who experienced something similar. That’s just creepy.

Stalking feats Also creepy: The “so and so looked at your profile” email I get once a week. Of course, half of the so-and-so’s are blanked out with generic descriptions like “someone in the Marketing and Advertising industry from Greater New York City Area.” At least I know I’m being cyber stalked by someone who wants to sell me something instead of wanting to murder me.

I know what LinkedIn is trying to do: It wants me to pay to find out who that was. It’s the second oldest profession in high-tech form; LinkedIn was willing to flash me a little flesh, but if I wanted to see the whole show I’d have to pony up.

Endorse? Of course Then we come to LinkedIn endorsements. If you used LinkedIn at any point in the last six months, you’ve been nagged to endorse four or more of your friends as to their various and sundry skills. And nagged again every time you logged in or someone else endorsed you.

From LinkedIn’s perspective, these endorsements have been highly successful because they coaxed people into interacting with the network much more often than they would have otherwise (all while stroking their egos). For everyone else? Not so much, mostly because you can endorse anyone for virtually anything. My personal list of endorsements includes hatha yoga, gambling, and “wears many hats.”

I asked a tech recruiter what he thought of these endorsements. “Totally worthless,” was his response. “They are a joke.”

You may have already won! The spam did not stop there. There were those silly “you are in the top X percent most viewed profiles on LinkedIn” announcements last February, which succeeded in suckering a lot of people to boast about their elevated LinkedIn status on Twitter and Facebook. Gee, I’m only one of 20 million. I feel so special.

These days when I log into LinkedIn I am immediately shunted over to a page that really wants me to import my email contacts. No thank you, I’ve now said for the 27th time, just take me to my profile.

I haven’t even gotten to the LinkedIn password breach from last July, in which the network spilled 6.5 million not-very-well-encrypted logins to a Russian hacking site. The site’s privacy policy now includes this lovely little nugget:

Since the internet is not a 100% secure environment, we cannot ensure or warrant the security of any information you transmit to LinkedIn. There is no guarantee that information may not be accessed, disclosed, altered, or destroyed by breach of any of our physical, technical, or managerial safeguards. It is your responsibility to protect the security of your login information.

Here’s the ironic bit. As a company, LinkedIn is worth more than at any time in its 10-year history. But LinkedIn connections themselves? They’re worth less and less.

So congratulations, LinkedIn, on your milestone. Hope it was worth all the sacrifices we had to make for you to get there.

How important is LinkedIn to you? Post your thoughts below or endorse — er, email me: cringe@infoworld.com.

This article, “Happy birthday to LinkedIn, the biggest social network no one uses,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.