LinkedIn Now Targeting Universities, 14-Year-Olds 87
Nerval's Lobster writes "Get 'em young: That could be LinkedIn's new motto, after the professional-networking Website opened itself up to universities and students. LinkedIn's University Pages offer schools a place to post updates about campus news and activities; they can also link to famous alumni, who will doubtlessly love when a couple thousand students try to connect with them all at once. Some 200 universities are setting up LinkedIn Pages, including NYU, the University of Michigan, the University of Illinois, the Rochester Institute of Technology, and more. Why this aggressive expansion into a younger demographic? Today's students are tomorrow's cubicle bees and entrepreneurs; by locking them into the network early, LinkedIn can (at least in theory) maintain a user base for many years to come. (It's safe to presume that at least a fraction of these young users will eventually engage LinkedIn's paid services, which makes this initiative a long-term revenue play.) Building a substantial base among students could also help LinkedIn head off future competition, such as Facebook moving more aggressively into the careers space. Or it could just open a whole lot of concerns over privacy and security, similar to what Facebook already faces with its teen audience."
LinkedIn much worse than Facebook (Score:2, Interesting)
It doesn't let you block people, and it lets people know when you've visited their profile. It's fucking creepy as hell, and yet everyone gets on Facebook's case instead.
Facebook for people with more severe USI (Score:5, Interesting)
"Networking" is already annoying, being mostly about forming fake social relationships to advance your career. Click-to-Like networking on the Internet is even worse, as there is no real effort nor assessment of reputation.
Re:I left the first time they were hacked... (Score:4, Interesting)
I left when people I barely knew started "endorsing" me for skills I don't have.
"Oh you work in IT, right? I'll endorse you for SEO skills"
Never been so insulted in my life.
Spam (Score:4, Interesting)
I manage an application/server suite that includes some mail functionality. In the 5 years I've been doing it I've only ever had to enter 1 domain into the blacklist... linkedin.com
It remains, to this day, the only site in the blacklist.
Closed My Account (Score:2, Interesting)
Two weeks ago:
LinkedIn Shuts Down TopTal Ads That Featured Photos Of Female Engineers [huffingtonpost.com]
In the last two weeks, have they fixed the cultral problem at Linked-In? I doubt it.
Originally it was the only social network that I was willing to join.
Now it's the social network that I am most happy to have left.
The beast only rows hungrier (Score:5, Interesting)
Sniff sniff .. I smell a company being run on VC vapors...a concerns for numbers that have to keep going by hook or by crook lest the actual valuation of the business-plan-free enterprise all come tumbling down..
What does LinkedIn sell and to whom and for how much and how often? How much is any of our data even worth with every cloud-based social-web search-engine new media play all running the same analytics on the same user base? A dollar? A buck fifty? Once? I'm worth a 1000 times that to Starbucks and they have only to plop down another green fish-girl sign on some block that doesn't already have one to start minting fresh people just like me.
There has to be a limit to the amount of money that can change hands for binders filled with women's likely shopping preferences and how many times you can sell this information to sellers. People aren't just aren't born and don't die that fast. Once you know someone is a liberal Subaru driving lesbian with a soft spot for abused animals, a keen interest in Sara Maclaughlin and a $1500.00 a year wardrobe budget where is there to go for the next 50 years with this person ?