LinkedIn’s Alternate Universe - Divinations

For many users, LinkedIn is primarily an online resume. There are a few segments of users, however, which are, in fact, starting to “live” on the site. The primary group is executive recruiters. Because of the breadth and quality of LinkedIn’s member base, recruiters are using it to identify, contact and check references on passive job seekers – i.... See more

Although the mainstream business professional does not yet have a compelling reason to spend time on LinkedIn daily, a big focus of the company is to add features to motivate broader regular usage. Recent new feature examples include finding and endorsing service providers such as lawyers and accountants, re-connecting with former colleagues and cl... See more

People used to call LinkedIn “work Facebook”, by which I think they meant it's a mindless website where people gab about their work lives. But LinkedIn isn’t really about work in any meaningful sense. Of course, people talk about working on LinkedIn. Oh, how they love to talk about working! No matter the shitty job, no matter the grueling hours, ev... See more

LinkedIn has a huge content deficit: They are begging people to take their money and create on their platform. Find the arbitrage in the market.

First, LinkedIn does not cover every job category sufficiently. For example, blue collar workers have never been able to use LinkedIn to showcase their work history and to find new opportunities. Second, many job opportunities are in the form of gigs, or shifts, which are very different from the full time employment opportunities found on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn may be the social app Silicon Valley product people like to grouse about the most, but while many of the complaints are valid, its sizable market cap is testament to the value of its graph. It turns out if you map out the professional graph, not just today but also across long temporal and organizational dimensions, recruiters will pay a l... See more

Compared with the fragmented, D.I.Y. Web I knew, social media felt strangely predictable. User profiles on new sites like LinkedIn or Flickr were templated and surrounded by ads. They offered preset options from categories and drop-down menus—age, location, institutional affiliation—and quantified influence through friend and follower counts. The n... See more