Posted inInformation Technology / Investing

Was Leaving LinkedIn Your New Years Eve Resolution?

seasoned_geek by seasoned_geek

It was mine. Thousands of others didn’t bother to wait and more thousands will be leaving this year. This is a site which one time had a purpose but is now less relevant than MySpace (remember MySpace?). In management’s misguided effort to chase FaceBook and Twitter customer bases they have made changes to the site which make it less than useless for professional groups. Wasn’t the entire point of LinkedIn professional groups?

The site has been on a downward spiral for the past couple of years. Recent changes make it appear they used off-shore labor to do the work. I mean the 4000 character limit on individual posts was pathetic to start with. People discussing thesis level topics need room to support their positions, not be forced to scatter content across dozens of posts. The new bug ridden editor has a seemingly random character limit, sometimes its a few hundred and other times it is more. No way to know what it feels like when you start typing.

Professional groups have been beating a path out the door. With the groups go their thousands of members. Some members actively nuke their accounts on the way out, others just let them go idle. It will be interesting to see if LinkedIn bothers to purge accounts inactive for a year or simply leave them in place to inflate subscriber count.

Another thing which turned members off is the _constant_ sales pitches from LinkedIn trying to sell account upgrades and other services. Not only is the spam annoying, if the site was worth keeping in a person’s life people would find a need to have an upgraded account. Why pay to be a member of a site which is becoming less relevant with each passing day.

Having achieved their initial goal of becoming less relevant than MySpace for professionals with college educations, it will be interesting to see if 2016 is the year management achieves its ultimate goal. What is that you ask? To become less relevant than mud flavored chewing gum.

Roland Hughes started his IT career in the early 1980s. He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++/Qt touchscreen/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the "Zinc It!" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc.

A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there "The Minimum You Need to Know" book series was born.

Three years later he wrote his first novel "Infinite Exposure" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of "The Earth That Was" trilogy:
Infinite Exposure
Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told
John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars

When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.