Mostly good experience with LinkedIn

Personally, I have mostly good experience with LinkedIn. Specifically regarding connecting me to people I don't know. I've used it for:

• Getting contacted about potential jobs - including getting a job from a recruiter who found me on LinkedIn
• Finding job leads
• Connecting to others in my profession
• Passing along job leads and other contact requests
• Contacting people who work at places I was going for job interviews to get the inside scoop

These are all things that would not have happened if not for LinkedIn. The benefits far out weigh the minor annoyance of people trying to add you to their network even though they don't know you.

On the ComputerWorld site, there are several postings on Curt Monash's blog that are bent on proving LinkedIn sucks and is a waste of time. The first article, The continuing discussion of LinkedIn goes on about how LinkedIn doesn't live up to it's promises. That it only benefits people that already know each other. My own experience puts the lie to that opinion.

The posting, The Short, Linked-In Life of Rob Carpenter, details an artificial experiment on linked in by Curt that supposedly "proves" how bad LinkedIn is.To me it seems like a GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) scenario. If you input garbage like creating a fake profile with no intention of being serious, then you should expect to get garbage out of the situation. Luckily Konstantin Guericke, a co-founder of LinkedIn stood up and reinforced the correct way to use LinkedIn. By the way, I saw Patrick Ewers of LinkedIn speak at CSix last summer. He elucidated us on the social networking tool philosophy and how to get maximum benefit.