LinkedIn (...small GNHLUG logos)

[Greg Rundlett]

On Nov 17, 2007 1:10 PM, Jim Kuzdrall <gnhlug at intrel.com> wrote:
> On Saturday 17 November 2007 08:56, Ted Roche wrote:
> >
> > I'd like to set up a GNHLUG group on LinkedIn,...
>
>   Are you sure you want to get involved with LinkedIn?  I have no
> concrete information that the free come-on is just a front, but a
> push-advertising marketer would make a very high value sales list by
> cross-correlating the fields listed by linked professionals.  Have you
> read the User Agreement?
>
> "In the event of any inconsistency between the LinkedIn Privacy Policy
> and this User Agreement, the User Agreement shall control."
>
> "We reserve the right to modify this Agreement at any time, and without
> prior notice, by posting amended terms on this website."
>
>   This effectively means the Privacy Policy is not worth the bits to
> send it. As soon as LinkedIn gets enough names, they can infer
> interests from the map plus the data supplied by registrants. Both the
> registrant and those that just link are vulnerable. The User Policy
> provisions allow them to sell the information to any spam engine they
> please - including non-technical ones.
>
>   Maybe I am old fashioned, but I don't like private companies (or
> governments) profiling me. A few IC ads via email can be trashed, but
> it identifies me as a middle-class professional and, should times get
> tough, people might get nasty. The less information the world has
> about me, the safer I feel.  How about you?
>
>     There I go.  A paranoid over-reaction again.
>
> Jim Kuzdrall
>

I agree with Jim's common sense approach to trust and information
sharing (read the fine print; beware the fine print).

However, I was pleasantly surprised today by LinkedIn.  What surprised
me today was that I discovered exactly the opposite of what you would
expect if a company was compiling and hording information to sell to
the highest bidder.  I discovered that LinkedIn puts user 'profile'
information [1] into an open standard microformat called hResume [2]
which opens up the information to machine access to any agent that
wants to discover and evaluate that information.  It's up to the
individual how much information goes into their 'public' profile, and
LinkedIn doesn't actually horde that information nor put it into a
proprietary format.

I thought that something like hResume would have been developed and
become the de-facto standard 10 years ago, but it didn't and is still
relatively obscure.  Both job-seekers and job posters have suffered in
that failure.  It's nice to see that LinkedIn is using that format.
In fact, according to the microformats website, it is the only
large-scale implementation (9 million profiles).  I'd like to see
others follow the open standard precedent that LinkedIn has set.

[1] my public profile http://www.linkedin.com/in/freephile
[2] http://microformats.org/wiki/hresume